Atmel achieves certification for PRIME v1.4 solutions

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The Atmel | SMART portfolio of metering solutions now support the latest advanced connectivity standards.

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Atmel has become the first company to receive the PRIME (PoweRline Intelligent Metering Evolution) v1.4 Profile 2 certification for the Atmel | SMART SAM4CP16B and ATPL230A smart metering solutions. The certification extends Atmel’s leadership and commitment to delivering state-of-the-art connectivity solutions and ensures that the company’s customers are able to develop high performance solutions, incorporating new features of the PRIME v1.4 standard. The latest standard supports some of the most demanding requirements of smart metering systems by offering increased robustness, throughput, band expansion, band-plan flexibility and IPv6.

“We are pleased to be the first semiconductor supplier to help develop and validate the technology, and to achieve this significant milestone with deep cooperation and partnership with our customers and the PRIME Alliance over a period of nearly five years,” said Kourosh Boutorabi, Senior Director of Smart Energy Solutions at Atmel. “We see increased interest in the PRIME standard by utilities in EMEA, Latin America and Asia and believe that as its adoption and proliferation continues, it is essential that its technical evolution continue to be fully standard compliant and certifiable by our customers as well as the utilities.”

PRIME is a mature, consolidated and worldwide PLC standard for advanced metering. There are currently millions of smart meters based on the PRIME standard that have been deployed supporting the PRIME v1.3. The Atmel | SMART portfolio of solutions now fully comply with both v1.3 and v1.4 standards ensuring total flexibility and scalability for original equipment manufacturers developing next-generation smart metering systems worldwide.

Interested in learning more? The Atmel PRIME v1.4 Profile 2 Certification is available on the PRIME Alliance website. Meanwhile, you can delve deeper into the wide range of PRIME-based PLC solutions here.

Exploring smart meters in the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) isn’t a single homogenous market but splits up into different segments with very different requirements. A lot of IoT markets are still in our future: next generation wearable medical devices, autonomous cars and more. One area where IoT has been going strong, long enough that it probably pre-dates the catchy buzzword IoT, is smart power meters.

Atmel recent announced their latest power line communications SoC specifically designed for this market. The SAM4CP16B is an extension of Atmel’s SAM4Cx smart energy platform built on a dual-core 32-bit ARM Cortex-M4 architecture. It is fully compatible with Atmel’s ATPL230A OFDM physical layer device compliant with PRIME standard specification. The flexible solution addresses OEM’s requirements for various system partitioning, BOM reduction and time-to-market requirements by incorporating independent application, protocol stack and physical layer processing functions within the same device. Key features of the SoC include integrated low-power driver, advanced cryptography, 1MB of embedded Flash, 152KB of SRAM, low-power real-time clock, and an LCD display controller.

I think that as various submarkets of the Internet of Things develop, we will see a lot of devices like this; SoCs that integrate everything that is required for a particular application, leaving the system company to customize the hardware, add their own software and so on. IoT will not be a market like mobile, with huge chips being done in the latest process generation. Many IoT designs will include analog, RF and sensors, all of which are best designed in older processes like 65nm or even 130nm.

The system volumes for many designs will be relatively low and so designing a specific chip for each application will be unattractive. Even in mobile where the volumes are much higher, only Apple and Samsung design their own application processors, as far as I know. Everyone else licenses one from Qualcomm, Mediatek or others… Even Apple gets the modem (radio) from Qualcomm. The aggregate volumes will end up being large (there will be a lot of things) so the prize goes to the semiconductor companies that do the best job of designing chips that match what the system companies require.

Interested in learning more? The data sheet for the part can be found here. (Warning: It’s 1,000 pages!)

This post has been republished with permission from SemiWiki.com, where Paul McLellan is a featured blogger. It first appeared there on August 13, 2014.

Atmel introduces next-gen SoC solution for smart metering

Atmel recently announced the introduction of its latest Power Line Communication System-on-Chip (SoC) solution designed for smart metering applications.

The Atmel SAM4CP16B is an extension of Atmel’s SAM4Cx smart energy platform built on a dual-core 32-bit ARM® Cortex®-M4 architecture. Fully compatible with Atmel’s ATPL230A OFDM physical layer (PHY) device compliant with PRIME standard specification, this highly flexible solution addresses OEM’s requirements for various system partitioning, BOM reduction and time-to-market requirements by incorporating independent application, protocol stack and physical layer processing functions within the same device.

“We continue to build on the success of our industry leading SAM4Cx platform and offer best-in-class embedded connectivity, flexibility and cost structure for high-volume smart metering deployments,” said Andres Munoz, Atmel Marketing Manager, Smart Energy Communications. “Furthermore, additional enhancements developed to meet PRIME standard specifications provide unprecedented performance in rigorous environments.”

As part of the Atmel® | SMART™ family, the solution includes integrated low-power driver, advanced cryptography, 1Mbytes of embedded Flash, 152Kbytes of SRAM, low-power RTC, and LCD controller. Additional key features include:

• Application/Master Core
  — ARM Cortex-M4 running at up to 120 MHz
  — Memory Protection Unit (MPU)
  — DSP Instruction
  — Thumb®-2 instruction set
  — Instruction and Data Cache Controller with 2 Kbytes Cache Memory
• Co-processor
  — ARM Cortex-M4F running at up to 120 MHz
  — IEEE® 754 Compliant, Single precision Floating-Point Unit (FPU)
  — DSP Instruction
  — Thumb-2 instruction set
  — Instruction and Data Cache Controller with 2 Kbytes Cache Memory
• Symmetrical/Asynchronous Dual Core Architecture
  — Interrupt-based Interprocessor Communication
  — Asynchronous Clocking
  — One Interrupt Controller (NVIC) for each core
  — Each Peripheral IRQ routed to each NVIC Input
• Cryptography
  — High-performance AES 128 to 256 with various modes (GCM, CBC, ECB, CFB, CBC-MAC, CTR)
  — TRNG (up to 38 Mbit/s stream, with tested Diehard and FIPS)
  — Classical Public Key Crypto accelerator and associated ROM library for RSA, ECC, DSA, ECDSA
  — Integrity Check Module (ICM) based on Secure Hash Algorithm (SHA1, SHA224, SHA256), DMA assisted
• Safety
  — 4 Physical Anti-tamper Detection I/O with Time Stamping and Immediate Clear of General Backup Registers
  — Security bit for Device Protection from JTAG accesses
• PRIME PLC embedded modem
  — Power Line Carrier Modem for 50 Hz and 60 Hz mains
  — 97-carriers OFDM PRIME compliant
  — DBPSK, DQPSK, D8PSK modulation schemes available
  — Additional enhanced modes available: DBPSK Robust, DQPSK Robust
  — Eight selectable channels between 42kHz to 472kHz available
  — Baud rate Selectable: 5.4 to 128.6 kbps
  — Four dedicated buffers for transmission/reception
  — Up to 124.6 dBμVrms injected signal against PRIME load
  — Up to 79.6 dB of dynamic range in PRIME networks
  — Automatic Gain Control and continuous amplitude tracking in signal reception
  — Class D switching power amplifier control
• Shared System Controller
  — Power Supply
  — Embedded Core and LCD Voltage Regulator for single supply operation
  — Power-on-Reset (POR), Brownout Detector (BOD) and Watchdog for safe operation
  —Low Power Sleep and Backup modes

Interested in learning more about Atmel’s new comprehensive smart energy platform? You can check out our recent deep dive on the subject here.