A Flexible SoC Subsystem for Harmonic Measurement and Metering

Abstract

The widespread use of power electronic devices has introduced a lot of harmonics to the power grid. It is increasingly essential that an energy meter in the smart grid is able to measure the harmonics. In this paper, we design a flexible harmonic processing SoC subsystem for the energy meter. The subsystem is composed of a transceiver to receive and transfer data through an SPI automatically, a fast fourier transform (FFT) engine to transform the received time-domain signal to the frequency-domain, and a digital signal processor (DSP) to measure the harmonics from the FFT results. With the flexibility of the design, users can carry out different harmonic processing algorithms without taking up much CPU resources. The design is verified by universal verification methodology (UVM) verification and field programmable gate array (FPGA) prototyping and is currently under fabrication.