TI demos commitment to smart grid technology with new wired and wireless system solutions

DALLAS, USA: Texas Instruments Inc. (TI) announced four new system solutions for Smart Grid and metering applications, enabling designers to further accelerate time to market for PLC-based and low-power wireless products.

Advancing complete solutions for power line communications (PLC), TI introduced the new PLC Development Kit (TMDSPLCKIT-V3) that recently received PRIME certification. Coupling the TMS320F2806x Piccolo floating-point microcontroller and new AFE031 analog front end (AFE), the new kit combines the best of analog and digital to deliver all of the key components required for today's advanced Smart Grid applications. It also offers new services that reduce device maintenance costs while increasing system reliability.

Key features and benefits
* AFE031 is the industry's most complete and flexible PLC analog front end that integrates the analog circuitry required for many PLC applications allowing customers to optimize the total bill of material (BOM) costs and board space in their designs, and significantly reduce design time and system complexity
* Piccolo microcontrollers have a smaller package and feature hardware acceleration for PLC alogorithms providing system cost and power consumption optimization
* TI's flexible PLC modem solution is capable of supporting multiple standards and modulation schemes like PRIME, G3-PLC, FlexOFDM and PLC-Lite libraries, including CENELEC bands A, B, C and D, and Federal Communications Commission (FCC) band, enabling application compatibility with a wide variety of international requirements

Recognizing the need for solutions for the Smart Grid Infrastructure (SGI) and for data concentrator developers, TI introduced the PLC data concentrator reference demo on the SGI evaluation platform. TI's new data concentrator supports various PLC standards, including PRIME, G3, FlexOFDM libraries and more, on the same hardware.

Key features and benefits
* Developers now have the option to add PLC communication supporting different protocol standards in one design, rather than change hardware as previously required.
* Based on TI's PLC solution (AFE031+Piccolo MCU) for the PLC Physical layer (PHY) and lower Media Access Controller (MAC), and on Linux-operating-system-enabled AM18x ARM9 microprocessors or the pin-for-pin compatible OMAP-L138 DSP + AR processor, for MAC and upper layer on ARM with optional analytics on the DSP, the data concentrator is fully supported by TI's software solutions and free hardware reference design schematics, BOM and layout gerber files.