Endesa, Spain´s largest utility, Renesas Technology, a supplier of semiconductor solutions to the metering industry, and Yitran, a PLC fabless semiconductor company, have signed an agreement to jointly develop an open specification for automatic meter management .
Endesa, with the participation of various internal units and the collaboration of many national and international leading meter manufacturers, has defined an innovative AMM system that will allow for remote reading and operation of its domestic meters. This system will improve the service offered to the clients by the company (multi-tariffs, control of demanded power, connect and disconnect of power supply) using the low-voltage power distribution lines as physical support for communications.
The volume of the meter grid reaches almost 11 million meters in Spain alone. With the implementation of an AMM system, Endesa targets a further improvement of the service quality offered to its customers in a progressive and secure manner. The quality and efficiency will be guaranteed by an open specification that allows the participation of several suppliers with fully interoperable equipment.
After analyzing existing PLC technologies and a rigorous evaluation process, Endesa has signed an agreement with Renesas and Yitran. The technology provided by these two companies, adapted to Endesa’s requirements, will mean an innovation in the metering field using narrowband PLC technology.
While Endesa will provide its suppliers with an open specification and the freedom to implement it in any way they choose, they will have the added security of knowing that a cost-effective and complete implementation will already be available based on Renesas’ M16C PLC platform and Yitran’s IT800 device.
The specification puts Endesa’s metering concept into practice via a jointly developed networking layer based on a combination of Endesa’s meter management know-how and Renesas’ experience in the implementation of its widely acclaimed RUN-MTM meter networking software. The physical layer is based on Yitran’s IT800 using DCSK modulation technique that has been especially designed to cope with the characteristic distortion phenomena of distribution powerlines.
Renesas originally signed a license agreement with Yitran in 2002 to incorporate Yitran’s DCSK technology into its M16C family of microcontrollers to provide single-chip PLC solutions. Renesas developed its high-performance RUN-MTM networking implementation to run on the single-chip M16C PLC microcontrollers..
