G3 PLC Mono-chip Solution

G3-PLC was developed to meet the industry’s need for a potenally ubiquitous power line communication standard that would enable the smart grid vision. G3-PLC™ is a new advanced OFDM-based Power line Communication (PLC) technology that has now gained world-wide interest, and is under consideration by standards commitiees. The G3-PLC specification has been presented to all interested parties in order to promote interoperability and open-endedness among smart grid implementations.

G3-PLC facilitates highly reliable, high-speed, long-range communication over the existing power line grid. With the ability to cross transformers, infrastructure costs are reduced and with its support of Ipv6, the G3-PLC will be in adequation with power line communications on future installations. G3-PLC technology and its mesh network is presently a reference in the smart metering sector and most of the utilities are now imposing this standard in the new tenders.

Andrea Informatique has for many years been involved in PLC technologies, and has implemented, validated and certified Thunder. THUNDER is a complete G3-PLC soft stack (PHY, MAC & ADP layers).

Thunder has been certified in Cenelec A and FCC bands. Thunder can be upgraded, if required, when doing the firmware upgrade of the equipment.

Thunder is a complete and reliable solution for G3 PLC oriented applications. We pretend our solution can run on any micro-controller and that it could also be the master key of cost efficient mono-chip solutions in the smart metering sector.

Indeed, Thunder is a soft modem, runing in the application microcontroller and gives a huge flexibility to meter providers. In addition, the hardware design becomes more simple therefore more easy to validate, to maintain and to expand.

The business model presents very interesting financial options if we compare with the hard modems. The royalties are below the costs of available modems. With a hard modem, meter providers have to adapt the hardware to those devices, with Thunder you need only the line driver which facilitates the target design. As the line driver concerns, Andrea can present several options with different component providers.

As a complement of our Thunder offer, we are proposing a DLMS COSEM package. The main target of our DLMS COSEM full functional solution is to implement reliable and cost efficient meter applications in the right time-to-market. Smart meters are now getting widely accepted on most markets, not only in Europe but also worldwide, and cost is one of the most important issues. We also pretend we have all the master pieces of software to implement reliable meter applications in good conditions, and at the right time.

Thunder is the solution that decreases the gap between the required resources and the cost of the micro-controllers. As most of the components today, micro-controllers are getting powerful and their cost is decreasing.

Andrea Informatique has implemented a dedicated and optimized IPV6 Stack as a complement to the G3 Stack, in order to implement G3 equipment in excellent conditions.

Thunder is no less than tomorrow’s solution available today. Thunder complies with the last version of the G3 Alliance specifications.

 

Thunder has been optimized to use a minimum of resources. The figures below show the ROM & RAM required for both bands: Cenelec A and FCC.