Freescale Demos Smart Grid Designs

VIENNA -- Freescale Semiconductor demonstrated a Home Energy Gateway (HEG) reference platform at the Metering Europe conference. The HEG reference platform, which will be available in the fourth quarter of 2010, will enable fast development and time to market for a variety of value-added services around the deployment of the smart grid in countries around the world.

The HEG platform, developed by Freescale along with an ecosystem of partners, is targeted to original equipment manufacturers and utilities to start developing services in support of the smart grid. It includes features to support services such as collecting power consumption data from various sources, controlling activation and deactivation of Home Area Network (HAN) appliances, generating dashboards to provide feedback about power usage, providing control menus to control appliances and supporting a ubiquitous link to the WAN for remote control/readout.

“We believe that Freescale’s Home Energy Gateway platform provides a head start on designing services for smart grid deployments planned around the world,” said Bruno Baylac, director of Freescale’s Industrial and Multi-market segment marketing. “We have optimized the platform with cost and time to market in mind for development of home energy and smart In-home displays, enabling the vision of a smarter and greener home.”

In a separate release:

AUSTIN, Texas -- Freescale Semiconductor and Cirrus Logic (Nasdaq: CRUS) are working together to provide a proven, turnkey reference design for the growing digital utility meter market. The reference design, which is available today, pairs Cirrus Logic’s CS5463 analog front end (AFE) chip with Freescale’s 8-bit AC60 microcontrollers (MCUs), giving smart meter original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) a superior solution that allows for increased performance, design flexibility and lower system costs.

Smart power meters provide an economical way to measure energy usage in residential settings, provide real-time pricing based on demand and minimize energy consumption during peak periods. This enables utilities to reduce their need to build more electrical generation capacity.

A new report from Berg Insight concludes that the worldwide deployment of smart electricity meters will reach 302.5 million at the end of 2015, based on a compound annual growth rate of 31.1 percent between 2009 and 2015. During the next five years, penetration rates for smart meter technology are projected to more than double to nearly 50 percent in Europe and North America, while Asia-Pacific is projected to reach 25 percent by 2015, from less than one percent today. The report anticipates that growth will continue into the second half of this decade, with many markets approaching 100 percent penetration by 2020. Key market drivers include global efforts to upgrade the electric grid, such as the United States' $43 billion energy sector stimulus package that includes $4.5 billion for intelligent grid projects like advanced metering infrastructure (AMI).

Freescale Semiconductor Inc.