Fears of global climate changes and limited resources have increased energy awareness and conservation by both consumers and utilities. This trend will have a dramatic impact on consumer products as homeowners search for electrical appliances that are both energy efficient and cost effective. Given the lengthy development cycles for new products, now is the time to build energy awareness directly into next-generation products.
Energy Awareness
Electric utilities around the world are investing in smart grids, which are advanced electricity transmission and distribution networks that use two-way communications to improve the efficiency, reliability, and safety of power delivery and use. A by-product of the smart grid involves the installation of smart meters that read electricity consumption remotely, detect outages, identify electricity theft, remotely connect and disconnect service, and deliver prepaid electricity to customers who require this service.
Smart meters give utilities immediate access to data so that they can better project electricity demand from the grid. When demand is high, typically on hot or humid days, the grid becomes strained, forcing utilities to make difficult decisions such as increasing energy production with environmentally unfriendly coal-fired plants or by reducing electricity consumption among its customers.
Utilities deploying smart meters typically introduce two new programs to consumers: time-of-use (TOU) pricing and demand-response (DR) programs.
■ TOU pricing programs provide differential pricing for peak and off-peak use of electricity. The obvious goal of such programs is to discourage electricity consumption during peak periods, while encouraging consumption during off-peak periods. The implementation of such programs requires a certain level of energy awareness by consumers who will need to know when prices change. While many utilities are focused on the adoption of in-home displays to notify consumers, the most practical way to create awareness is by providing the information directly in the appliance itself.
■ DR programs, which have become a key component of energy-management policies, ensure a balance between supply and demand while simultaneously reducing greenhouse gas emissions. In an electricity grid, any significant imbalance between electricity consumption and production can cause grid instability or severe voltage fluctuations and failures within the grid. A DR program involves a utility notifying its customers of a pending electricity shortfall and asking them to reduce energy use in order to place usable megawatts back on a region’s energy grid. This eliminates the need to run coal-fired plants and reduces generation costs. In exchange, end-users are offered reduced electricity prices or other financial incentives.
DR programs can be automatic, with utilities having the right to reduce or turn off certain energy-consuming appliances for a short amount of time at customer sites, such as air conditioners, pool pumps, and hot water heaters. Signals are transmitted from the utility to the smart meter, and from the smart meter to network-connected consumer products.
So, why is this important to manufacturers of consumer products? Simple, over 100 million smart meters slated are to be installed worldwide over the next five to seven years. This “tidal wave” forming in the horizon will have a dramatic impact on consumer products as homeowners search for cost-effective solutions for managing their energy. Given the lengthy development cycles for new products, now is the time to build energy awareness directly into next-generation products.
Utilities are likely to implement economic incentives for consumers as well. Many utilities today offer rebates to consumers who purchase Energy Star appliances, and the same will hold true for the new Energy Aware products.
Electronic Displays Move Beyond Traditional Products
In many consumer products, touch-screen displays rapidly are replacing dials and push buttons as the user interface of choice. Several trends are influencing the adoption of displays, including declining costs, GUIs, future-proofing, and consumer interest.
Costs continue to decline, thanks to advanced circuits that combine display controllers and multiple microcontroller units (MCUs) into a single integrated circuit. With rising consumer demand and increased production capacity, LCD prices are continuing to fall, as does the total bill of materials (BOM) cost.
GUIs can improve the consumer human-machine interface experience by supporting larger fonts, buttons, colors, and multiple languages. Manufacturers of multiple brands can leverage a single investment across multiple product lines because changes are supported easily via software in both the integrated circuits and software interface.
Investments in future-proofed designs will allow manufacturers to integrate new features such as displaying utility price signals from the electricity meter, notifying consumers about current or future DR events, and running system diagnostics to debug problems in the field or remotely through an Internet connection.
Displays will play a vital role in homes as consumers seek tools to interact and manage devices in their home. In-home displays are already supported by utilities who want their customers to alter energy consumption behavior based on electricity availability. Several premium home appliances such as refrigerators, washers and dryers, dishwashers, and air conditioners are now sold with touch-screen display capability included.
A number of non-traditional GUIs are emerging such as wireless routers, DSL modems, and network-attached storage devices for scheduling events, creating scenes, and sharing energy data. DVRs, DVD players, set-top boxes, and media centers make ideal interfaces for consumers preferring to interact with their homes through their televisions. Of course, communication tools such as telephones, mobile phones, MP3 players, and other wireless devices are also excellent candidates. Finally, there are utility-oriented products such as thermostats and in-home displays that can extend functionality to include device management.
Connecting Everyday Devices
People typically think of a home network in terms of a local area network (LAN). A new type of network is rapidly emerging called a home area network (HAN), which is used to connect consumer products together such as appliances, thermostats, pools and spas, light switches, electrical outlets, and other energy-consuming devices. Devices in the HAN may connect to a LAN or computer network to allow consumers to monitor electricity consumption, manage schedules, and remotely access the home, but the computer typically does not control all of the devices in the network. This represents a significant paradigm shift in the idea of control systems requiring a central computer or controller to manage all devices. By embedding intelligence in every device, there is no need for expensive controllers to manage devices. This approach eliminates the extra cost, complexity, and unreliability of traditional home automation systems.
The presence of a HAN brings hidden benefits to consumers and manufacturers, such as enabling remote diagnostics and troubleshooting capabilities that are commonly used with equipment in LANs today. New or improved software and firmware upgrades can be added to devices remotely, eliminating the need for costly maintenance calls.
Ensuring product compatibility from different vendors involves supporting an open industry standard. The most popular HAN standards using home power wiring is the ANSI/CEA 709.1 standard in the U.S. and the EN 14908 standard in Europe. Both standards support a robust protocol that is incorporated in over 100 million intelligent devices today, including over 30 million power line-based devices around the globe.
One of the most popular power line solutions is the Power Line Smart Transceiver from Echelon Corporation. Power Line Smart Transceivers feature a highly reliable narrow-band power line transceiver, an 8-bit Neuron processor core for running applications and managing network communications, a choice of on-board or external memory, and an extremely small form factor-all at a price that is compelling for even the most cost-sensitive consumer product applications.
The PL 3170 Smart Transceiver includes Interoperable Self Installation (ISI) technology built into the firmware. ISI is part of the European Committee of Manufacturers of Domestic Appliances (CECED) standard for networking home appliances together based on the ANSI/CEA and EN standards. The ISI protocol allows consumers to install HAN-enabled devices without a dedicated computer or software program, thus enabling a true “press and play” environment. Simple items such as appliances can be connected to the HAN simply by plugging in the appliance to the electricity outlet and then pressing a button on the device.
However, a power line is a very challenging communication channel. Intermittent noise sources, impedance changes, and attenuation make the power line a hostile signaling environment. The Power Line Smart Transceivers incorporate a variety of technical innovations to insure reliable operation:
■ A unique dual-carrier frequency feature automatically selects an alternate secondary communication frequency should the primary frequency be blocked by noise.
■ A highly efficient, patented, low-overhead forward error correction (FEC) algorithm can overcome errors induced by noise.
■ Sophisticated digital signal processing (DSP), noise cancellation, and distortion correction algorithms correct for a wide variety of signaling impediments, including impulsive noise, continuous tone noise, and phase distortion.
■ A high-output, low-distortion external amplifier design delivers 1 Amp into low impedance loads, eliminating the need for expensive phase couplers in typical residential applications.
Reducing Cost Through Integration
Manufacturers are constantly seeking ways to reduce the BOM cost for their products. Altera, Echelon, and
PlanetWeb have collaborated to provide a highly integrated solution to address this demand.
One of the often-overlooked solutions for cost reduction lies in the integrated circuits themselves. FPGAs combine several components into a single integrated circuit that can be programmed in the field after manufacture. The chip is composed of an array of configurable logic cells (also called logic elements (LEs)) that can be configured or programmed to perform one of a variety of simple functions, such as computing the logical AND of two inputs. FPGA logic cells can be used as building blocks to implement any kind of functionality desired, from low-complexity state machines to high-performance microprocessors.
Traditionally, developers used FPGAs to verify design concepts and build initial product prototypes. However, with the recent advancement in the semiconductor submicron technology, low-cost FPGAs have made their entrance into many of the high-volume, consumer household products such as digital TV, set-top boxes, DVRs, and personal media players. By using the Altera® Cyclone® III FPGA with Nios® II soft processor core, it is possible to replace multiple MCUs with one single FPGA. Custom functions can be created with software libraries from Altera or third parties.
This future-proof solution supports new features, last-minute changes, and rapid adaptation to changing market requirements.
Based on the TSMC 65-nm low-power process technology, Cyclone III FPGAs offer a flexible, reliable, and cost-effective solution to consumer appliances and home automation manufacturers. In conjunction with Nios II embedded processors, Cyclone III FPGAs enable designers to produce highly integrated systems, thereby reducing BOM cost, power consumption, and design complexity.
Echelon provides a software interface called the Shortstack API to connect the Nios II processor to the Power Line Smart Transceiver. This API allows communication protocol to take place between the host (Nios II processor) residing within an appliance display and other devices connected to the same HAN, such as lighting fixtures, dish-washers, refrigerators, pool pumps, and water heaters.
In addition to the Echelon Shortstack API, the Nios II processor also interfaces with the PlanetWeb SpectraWorks software. This is a platform-independent embedded systems GUI technology suite, enabling highly interactive branded applications on any type of device. It allows homeowners to interact with all devices that are connected to the HAN.
Benefits of Energy Aware
The “Energy Aware” appliance platform developed jointly by Altera, Echelon, and PlanetWeb delivers proven, reliable performance and rapid development solution for home energy control to consumers, home appliance and home automation manufacturers, and utility companies alike. The solution delivers benefits to homeowners in two ways:
■ Upon receiving power-warning messages from the electric utility companies via the smart meters, homeowners can program certain home appliances not to operate during peak time, thus reducing household energy costs while avoiding blackouts.
■ By knowing how much energy is consumed by every household appliance (connected to the power line network) in terms of watts and dollars, homeowners can take a pro-active approach in dimming certain room lighting or programming the washer and dryer only to operate at certain times of the day.
For home appliance, home automation, or in-home display manufacturers’ standpoint, this solution delivers the following benefits:
■ Increase revenues and customer loyalty by providing additional services such as regular appliance maintenance or malfunction fixes without the need for the customer to place a phone call. Instead, the smart appliance automatically sends a service request to manufacturers via power line network.
■ Cut service costs by remotely upgrading new software or diagnosing a malfunction before sending a technician equipped with the right parts coming over to fix the problem.
■ Reduce total development cost while improving time-to-market with product scalability so that multiple products share the same hardware platform, with software features added or subtracted to create end-product differentiation.
■ Beat competition with the ability to react quickly: any last minute design change to accommodate bug-fixes or new features can be accomplished even after production, thanks to the flexibility and programmability of FPGAs.
The utility companies also benefit from this solution with the ability to remotely control and monitor consumer energy usages or directly communicate electricity alert messages to homeowners in special circumstances such as outage detection or electricity theft identification.
Complete Set of Tools to Jump-Start the Design Process
By integrating the PlanetWeb GUI, Echelon’s Power Line Smart Transceiver and Shortstack API, and the Altera Cyclone III FPGA and Nios II embedded processor, developers have a powerful platform for developing cost-effective, yet robust solutions.
Altera
To give designers a quick start, Altera provides a suite of complete, easy-to-use tools. The Quartus® II design software is a comprehensive environment available for system-on-chip (SOC) design, encompassing all phases of the FPGA design process. A comprehensive design methodology based on SOPC Builder, a system generator tool, enables designers to quickly assemble a custom device tailored to their need in matters of minutes. Using SOPC Builder and Altera’s library of intellectual property (IP) cores, designers can select the right component for their FPGA function and verify its functionality relatively quickly. Altera also partners with several third-party companies to provide additional IP to end customers as needed. In addition to the software design tools, Altera offers a development kit and a set of design examples to help the home appliance, home automation, and in-home display designers kick-start the process.
Echelon
Echelon offers the Power Line Smart Transceiver Development Support Kit (PL DSK v.2.1) for creating power line applications. Reference designs are provided to assist with external discrete interface circuits that are required to support the Echelon Power Line Smart Transceiver IC. Key features of the PL DSK include:
■ Instantaneously evaluate Power Line technology in real-life environments using the two evaluation boards (one based on PL3120 and the other based on PL3150) that come with a simple-to-use, pre-loaded application.
■ Several reference designs are provided to help engineers pick the best commonly used and tested design for their application.
■ Expanded layout tool support is provided for three of the most commonly used layout tools around the world: P-CAD, OrCAD, and PADS PowerPCB.
PlanetWeb
PlanetWeb’s SpectraWorks is a high-performance, proven GUI technology suite that includes two major components:
■ SpectraCore: a platform-independent embedded graphical engine that enables rapid porting from one platform to another because the APIs are identical on the target hardware platform and the Windows simulation. A Hardware Abstraction Layer isolates the SpectraCore from the platform-specific details.
■ SpectraBuilder: a WYSIWYG GUI-building tool that leverages a highly optimized portable graphics widgets engine to enable a complete GUI transformation, including significant user-interaction flow changes and language translations. With SpectraWorks binary GUI solutions, GUI design and deployment can happen in a single step: a platformdeployable asset file is passed directly from the designer to the engineer, ensuring the GUI is displayed exactly as designed. GUI objects are referenced by “name,” which isolates the GUI “skin” from the code. GUI changes to graphics, positions, strings, and resolutions can be made without changing code. Thus, repetitive development cycles are virtually eliminated, reducing the overall project risk and high costs associated with the graphical application development. The overall development costs are also reduced by removing risky human error-prone steps from the development process.
Conclusion
Altera, Echelon, and PlanetWeb have teamed up to provide a proven platform that delivers reliable performance and rapid development energy-saving solution for the home appliance, home automation, and in-home display manufacturers. The platform also offers a simple approach to help homeowners increase awareness and effectively save household energy by monitoring and controlling each and every electrical appliance connected to the HAN. Moreover, it also enables utility companies to remotely control and monitor consumer energy usages or directly communicate to homeowners should special circumstances required. In short, it offers a new way of life devoted to a greener, better environment to everyone.
Acknowledgements
■ Barry Haaser, Sr. Director, LonWorks Infrastructure Business, Echelon Corporation
■ Tina T. Tran, Sr. Customer Marketing Manager, Consumer and Automotive Business Unit, Altera Corporation
