AM57x Processors for Smart Grid Applications

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AM57x Processors for Smart Grid Applications [Copy link]

The smart grid and energy industries are evolving and becoming more efficient, but these efficiencies bring with them specific processor requirements. Embedded processing technology is what gives smart grids their “intelligence” because more logic than ever before is being used to monitor and control the distribution of power. In this era of technological change, known as Industry 4.0, TI’s Sitara AM57x processors are the perfect processors to meet the needs of smart grid applications, thanks to their powerful combination of cores. These new processors are ideal for a wide range of smart grid and energy applications, such as protection relays, substation Ethernet switches, substation gateways and substation controllers (RTUs), as flexible embedded solutions. Substation automation is a top priority for the smart grid industry, and the AM57x processors are well suited for design engineers facing substation-specific challenges, thanks to the special cores and peripherals available on the chip. Now, we’ll take a closer look at some of these peripherals and the benefits they offer. Protection relays are smarter than ever before; and it is well known that digital signal processors (DSPs) work best when used for analysis. In this device, the C66x DSP core is used to quickly crunch the large amounts of sampled data that enter each relay. The ARMCortex-A15 can be used for the application logic of all protection relays. The two PRU-ICSS cores provide up to four ports of 10/100 Ethernet, ideal for integrating redundancy and industrial protocol functions into the product. The PRU-ICSS cores are programmable, deterministic, real-time cores with dedicated interfaces. These cores can be programmed in C and can be used to emulate legacy interfaces, providing backward compatibility with devices already installed in the field. The substation controller (or automation gateway) is usually the core device for substation monitoring and automation. As the amount of logic incorporated in newer protection relays increases, substation controllers are also seeing an increase in the amount of logic (which may require the high performance of the ARM Cortex-A15 core). Using a processor equipped with a variety of peripherals allows developers to access more phase monitoring, control and data operations in the protection relay, so that the calculated net value can be forwarded to the substation controller. As a bridge between the protection relays and the operator's control room, the substation controller aggregates, filters and classifies data from the various protection relays and can efficiently transmit this information to the utility back office or control room. The ARM Cortex-A15 core is well suited for these aggregation and filtering tasks and allows higher-level tasks such as fault logging and data logging to be completed at the substation controller or gateway. The PRU-ICSS core is essential for application-specific tasks and backplane communications (which are extremely common in today's substation controllers).

Smart Grid Ethernet switches are additional end devices in the market that can benefit from a fully loaded system-on-chip (SoC). TI's unique PRU-ICSS subsystems are ideal for any switch that will handle industrial communication protocols because these subsystems can support multiple protocols on the same hardware, involving only firmware changes required to change from protocol to protocol. With two Ethernet ports (from the SoC-based switch) and four ports supporting industry-specific protocols via the PRU-ICSS, developers get a total of six lines without the need for external hardware. Some substation architectures may place more of the data classification and filtering applications within the Ethernet switch, while others prefer to use a substation gateway or controller to implement these functions. Regardless of the approach, embedded processors provide the necessary processing power to classify and filter the large amounts of data streams, which is becoming increasingly essential in smart grid infrastructure applications.

A rapidly evolving and innovative industry continues to strive for greater efficiency—advances driven in large part by embedded processing technology. Integration, communications, analytics, high reliability and real-time control are all recurring requirements across the industry, making a new class of embedded processors with advanced peripherals and scalability an excellent choice for smart grid designers.