TI's solutions help developers create next generation of breakthrough products for smart grid market

SAN ANTONIO, USA: A leading innovator in energy management, communication and control for the smart grid, Texas Instruments Inc. (TI) has expanded its portfolio in utility metering, home and building automation and smart grid infrastructure with technology and tools that help developers create secure, economical and future-proof solutions for the smart grid.

Demonstrating its commitment to advancing the efficiency of utility metering, TI recently introduced 24 new energy meter integrated circuits (ICs) that deliver industry-leading accuracy, flexibility, robustness and system cost savings for 1-phase, 2-phase and 3-phase electricity meter solutions.

The new MSP430F673x/F672x family of energy meter ICs combines the lowest power, most advanced metrology and clocking functionalities for high precision and robust electricity measurements design. The new energy meter ICs offer developers more flexibility in electricity metering and energy monitoring applications.

An active leader in the development of the ZigBee Smart Energy standard, TI's CC2538 system-on-chip (SoC) is the most powerful ZigBee SoC designed to support developers creating both current and next generation Smart Energy devices, without the added cost of a microcontroller or external memory. This cost-effective radio frequency (RF) solution for Smart Grid communication eases development of control applications for electricity, gas or water smart meters and in-home displays.

Also being introduced is TI's high performance CC1200 RF transceiver, an evolution of the CC1120 sub-1 GHz RF performance line, that supports the full bandwidth of the 802.15.4g standard for wireless smart utility networks in the sub-1 GHz bands.

Fulfilling the need for solutions to support the Smart Grid Infrastructure (SGI), TI offers the new PLC data concentrator reference demo on the SGI evaluation platform that helps developers reduce time-to-market. TI's new data concentrator give developers the option to add PLC communication supporting different protocol standards in one design, rather than change hardware as previously required. The SGI board supports various PLC standards, including PRIME, G3, FlexOFDM libraries and more, all on the same hardware.

Demonstrating its commitment to provide reliable power line communication (PLC) solutions, TI announced its support of the new power line communication (PLC) protocol, G3-PLC, as board of director of the G3 alliance. TI's G3 software package supports its PLC product offerings such as the PLC development kits and PLC data concentrator, enabling application compatibility with a variety of international requirements.

With unique modular hardware architecture and flexible software framework, TI's PLC solutions are the industry's only PLC-based technology capable of supporting multiple protocol standards and modulation schemes with a single platform.