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Many market research institutions predict that by 2030, the share of renewable energy (such as wind power and solar power) in the total global energy consumption will increase significantly. Advocating energy conservation, emission reduction, and green development have put forward new requirements for all industries. Energy-saving design that caters to the era of low-carbon economy has become an important manifestation of the competitiveness of energy companies and electronic products.
Market opportunities and challenges
The development of renewable energy is the general trend. Solar power and wind power are part of the smart grid, and both belong to the category of distributed power generation. Promoting the development of smart grids can bring many advantages, such as the use of two-way communication to achieve demand response management, alleviate power peaks, quickly find faults, avoid power outages, and achieve higher energy efficiency, reliability and safety; intelligently integrate new alternatives Energy, and provide electricity for electric and hybrid vehicles; better adjust energy supply and demand, use power plants and grids more efficiently, and reduce carbon emissions; provide dynamic tariff tables to help customers optimize total electrical energy consumption and electricity bills, Improve customer service; and remote meter reading and remote power-on and power-off can save labor costs and improve operational efficiency.
Under the consensus of promoting sustainable development, China is currently vigorously developing industries such as solar energy and wind energy, with promising prospects. Among them, the technology in the field of solar energy has matured day by day, and solar power generation has made great progress, and solar street lighting has also become more and more popular. In addition, in order to introduce a new generation of smart grids and improve the power infrastructure, the Chinese government has set an ambitious goal of investing 4 trillion yuan by 2020. The concept of “Strong & Smart Grid” has been introduced at the Shanghai World Expo. exhibit.
However, while developing renewable energy and upgrading the existing power grid, it also faces many challenges. For the semiconductor industry, the biggest challenge is energy conversion, because the key to the development of renewable energy lies in optimizing energy efficiency. Take solar-powered LED street lighting as an example. This application requires efficient and reliable solar panel charge controllers, as well as key components such as LED drivers, and the demand is considerable. Smart grids also require many electronic components from power generation, power distribution and field area networks to smart meter communications and home area networks. Including power factor controllers, AC-DC (AC/DC) and DC-DC (DC/DC) controllers, voltage regulators, MOSFETs, triacs (TRIAC), power line carrier modems, and filters , Input/output (I/O) and data protection, line driver and signal amplifier, LCD backlight driver, EEPROM memory and smart card interface, etc.
Examples of energy-efficient solutions applied to smart grids
1. Solutions to improve the energy efficiency of photoelectric conversion of solar panels
In recent years, the industry has paid more and more attention to street lighting using renewable clean energy solar energy. For solar street lights, it is very important to improve the photoelectric conversion energy efficiency of solar panels. The voltage-current (VI) characteristic curve of solar panels presents nonlinearity and variability, and it is very difficult to obtain the maximum amount of electrical energy from it. This requires the charge controller of the solar LED street light and other related electronic circuits (usually implemented by a microcontroller) to adopt effective control methods as much as possible to improve energy efficiency.
ON Semiconductor’s CS51221 enhanced voltage mode PWM controller is a device that can improve the energy efficiency of solar panels. It can control the charging of the solar panel battery, support the maximum peak power tracking (MPPT) function, provide compensation for the constantly changing VI characteristic curve of the solar battery, optimize the power output of the solar battery, improve energy efficiency, and charge the battery to the optimal power.
In the application circuit, it is necessary to select a suitable topological structure for CS51221. The topology should be able to reduce the output voltage of the solar panel to 12V in the case of one battery, and it can be easily modified in the case of two or more batteries to support boosting to 24V. The CS51221 itself can be configured as a forward, flyback, or boost topology. In the reference design launched for solar panel charging control applications, ON Semiconductor chose a flyback topology.
In the application, by dynamically adjusting the current limit on the ISET pin, the maximum peak power tracking function is realized. Once the input voltage drops pulse by pulse, the current limit will be reduced until the input voltage is restored. In this way, there is no need to use an expensive microcontroller. The charge controller realized in this way will find the peak power point and dynamically adjust it to conform to the constantly changing power supply characteristics. In fact, through the use of maximum peak power tracking technology, it is possible to transfer 30% more charge from the solar panel to the battery than before, so that the solar street light system can use a smaller size solar panel, which brings significant cost benefits. Figure 1 is a schematic diagram of solar panel charging control application using ON Semiconductor CS51221 controller.
Figure 1: Solar panel charging control application using ON Semiconductor CS51221 controller
In addition, ON Semiconductor’s NCP3066 constant current buck regulator can also be used in LED driver applications for solar street lights, providing the power and light output required by the system, and has extremely high energy efficiency.
2. Smart grid solutions
Today’s power grid has become larger, safer, and more energy efficient than ever before, but its degree of intelligence is still low, so smart grid is an important development trend today.
ON Semiconductor has invested and is investing heavily in smart grid research and development, covering all product lines, including power conversion analog ICs, signal ICs (such as low-noise amplifiers), power discrete devices (high-voltage MOSFETs, IGBTs, rectifiers), and mixed-signal ICs (smart cards) Interface IC, clock and timing IC), communication IC (such as PLC modem), logic IC, memory IC, and standard discrete devices (protection, filter).
The core of the smart grid is the smart meter. With the help of smart meters, power companies can know how much energy users use at what time, so that they can provide differentiated pricing and help users optimize their overall power consumption and electricity bills.
ON Semiconductor’s solution for smart meters includes a series of standard products, application-specific standard products (ASSP) and application-specific integrated circuits (ASIC), which can provide the four basic functions of smart meters, including: power/power management, metering, storage and Communication. Figure 2 is a smart meter application composed of a variety of devices from ON Semiconductor (the green part in the figure).
Figure 2: Smart meter application composed of various products of ON Semiconductor
The fully integrated power line carrier (PLC) modem AMIS-49587 is a key device in the Figure 2 application. The device can provide a highly integrated, standard-compliant low-power PLC solution, and can be used in fields such as smart power automatic meter reading and management, street lighting control, smart power plugs, and building automation. AMIS-49587 utilizes ON Semiconductor’s mixed-signal technology to integrate analog modem front-end and digital post-processing functions in an integrated circuit.
AMIS-49587 complies with the IEC1334 standard, which helps simplify design, reduce development and application costs, and accelerate the listing process. The device is based on the ARM7TDMI processor core, including physical interface transceiver (PHY) and media access controller (MAC) layers, while most competing solutions require complex embedded software to perform the same functions as AMIS-49587. The device uses spread spectrum frequency shift keying (S-FSK) modulation technology, combined with precise filtering, to provide reliable low data rate communication for long-distance power lines, and a 2,400bps (baud) half-duplex adjustable communication rate . The low operating frequency of less than 20 kilohertz (kHz) is equipped with an automatic repeater (repeater) function, which makes the communication more reliable, and the communication error is lower than other and existing solutions. Figure 3 is a block diagram of AMIS-49587.
Figure 3: Block diagram of AMIS-49587
Summary of this article
Driven by government energy conservation regulations and various energy efficiency plans, the renewable energy and emerging smart meter markets have huge growth potential. In this process, semiconductor devices will shoulder heavy responsibilities with their comprehensive advantages such as low energy consumption, high energy efficiency, high reliability, high speed, high intelligence, and small size.
ON Semiconductor has a broad product lineup based on advanced technology and a large scale of production to deal with the market opportunities and challenges of the smart grid, including standard products, ASSP and ASIC. The technology covers from extremely high voltage (700V) technology (used to develop analog power conversion ICs in power/power management) to sub-micron 0.11μm CMOS technology (integration of microcontroller core and mixed-signal analog on a single silicon chip) Circuit), and high-voltage MOSFET, IGBT and rectifier.
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