FPGA based Power Line Networking, Collaboration of Echelon and Altera

Echelon Corporation and Altera Corporation announced new products that enable makers of household appliances such as dishwashers, refrigerators, ovens, microwave ovens, etc. to add power line networking capability to their products.

Echelon and Altera have collaborated to provide solution that combines Altera Corporation’s 32 bit Nios II family of embedded processors for Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) with a specially programmed Echelon power line smart transceiver. Together, the solution enables appliance and other home device manufacturers to easily add power line networking to their products.

Altera’s FPGA technology offers powerful processing and significant cost advantages over standard microprocessor technologies in any market that demands variations in processor capabilities within similar product lines such as home appliances. The Nios II family of embedded processors consists of three processor cores that implement a common instruction set architecture, each optimized for a specific price/performance point, and all supported by the same software tool chain. Developers can build processor systems for well under $1.00 when implementing the smallest member of the Nios II processor family in a low-cost Cyclone™ II FPGA family.

Echelon’s family of LonWorks power line smart transceivers provide market-leading, low-cost, high-performance implementations of the EIA-709 control networking and power line communications standards. When programmed with Echelon’s ShortStack® 2.0 firmware (available at no charge from either Echelon’s web site or the web site of its pan-European distributor, EBV Elektronik), and interfaced to a Nios II processor, they enable manufacturers to create robust, full-featured, networked home control products.

About Altera Corporation
Altera’s programmable solutions enable system and semiconductor companies to rapidly and cost-effectively innovate, differentiate and win in their markets.

About Echelon Corporation
Echelon Corporation (NASDAQ:ELON) is a pioneer and world leader in control networking — networks that connect machines and other electronic devices — for the purpose of sensing, monitoring and controlling the world around us. Echelon’s LonWorks platform for control networking was released in 1990 and has become a worldwide standard in the building, industrial, transportation, and home automation markets. Launched in 2003, Echelon’s Networked Energy Services system is an open, extensible, advanced metering infrastructure that can bring benefits to every aspect of a utility’s operation, from metering and customer services to distribution operations and value-added business. In 2005 Echelon introduced the world’s first embedded control network infrastructure, the Pyxos™ platform, extending the benefits of networking inside machines to the sensors and actuators that make them function. Echelon is based in San Jose, California, with international offices in China, France, Germany, Italy, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, The Netherlands, and the United Kingdom.