Altera joins hands with IP vendors to capture China's smart grid market

Altera will deploy a large number of smart grids in China. China's 12th Five-Year Plan continues to promote the construction of smart grids, attracting field programmable gate array (FPGA) manufacturers to work with silicon intellectual property (IP) companies to expand the deployment of a series of solutions in order to seize the market first.

　　Jiang Yungui, senior market development manager of Altera's Asia Pacific Industrial Business Unit, said that although developed countries such as Europe and the United States are currently more active in deploying smart grids, and the progress of deployment by both private power plants and governments is very rapid, mainland China has great potential for future growth and is therefore also highly valued by relevant manufacturers.

　　Due to the serious problem of uneven power supply in mainland China, the 12th Five-Year Plan will strengthen the deployment of smart grids. Currently, coal is still the main source of electricity in mainland China, but 76% of the coal is distributed in Shanxi, Inner Mongolia, Shaanxi, Xinjiang, and other remote northwestern regions. This is not enough for the major energy-consuming provinces - the southeast coastal economic and industrial cities. Therefore, implementing power distribution and monitoring power consumption through smart grids has become the top priority of the mainland Chinese government.

　　In order to take the lead in the smart grid in mainland China, Altera has exclusively teamed up with Finnish IP manufacturer Flexibilis to launch a series of smart grid solutions. The two parties will promote smart grid equipment through a royalty-based business model, that is, Altera will use Flexibilis' Ethernet Switch IP and Ethernet Redundant Switch IP in FPGA and pay royalties based on the proportion of product shipments. This business model will be more ideal for the nascent and unpredictable smart grid market.

　　On the other hand, because smart grid equipment between manufacturers could not be fully interconnected before, the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) established the IEC 61850 standard to ensure that various devices in the smart grid can communicate bidirectionally and have interoperability. In addition, the smart grid must also meet the requirements of zero packet loss or instantly supplement the grid information with alternative transmission channels. Such requirements have led the IEC to develop the High Availability Seamless Redundancy (HSR) and Parallel Redundancy Communication Protocol (PRP) protocols, which intend to improve the reliability of smart grid equipment in a ring and dual-network manner respectively.

　　Jiang Yungui pointed out that although the IEC has initially formulated standards for smart grid interconnection and interoperability, due to the ever-changing market, it is expected that the standards will still have room for revision in the future. Therefore, FPGA will replace application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) and become an ideal component choice with high reliability while allowing customers to modify products in accordance with the latest standards in a short period of time.

　　It is worth noting that internationally renowned smart grid manufacturers ABB and Siemens have also been actively deploying in the Chinese mainland market in recent years. The former has jointly established a joint venture company, Nanjing SAC Automation, with China's State Grid Nanjing Automation for nearly two years, with ABB holding a 49% stake and State Grid Nanjing Automation holding a 51% stake; while the latter established the Shiwei Smart Metering System Service in a joint venture with China's Wasion Group in April this year, intending to enter the smart grid market in China and seize huge business opportunities by establishing relationships with local manufacturers in China.