Smart Termination

Customer – REPL

“One of the leading manufacturers of cable accessories for power and telecom industries across the globe.”

Problem Statement

REPL wanted to develop a self-powered, remote comms enabled version of their medium voltage (MV) smart termination while lowering the costs to allow larger scale rollouts.

Solution

We combined off-the-shelf sensor components with a cleverly engineered energy-harvesting circuitry to build a self-powered current and temperature sensor with modular BLE/GPRS/Modbus communication interfaces. This IP is now the basis for the next generation REPL smart terminations.

Challenges

1. Terminations have a lifetime of 10 year or more. Careful combination of lithium-ion batteries and supercapacitors allows us to achieve this lifetime.
2. We scouted the world to build a robust supply chain keeping quality and costs in mind and found a key supplier in our backyard!
3. Achieving Class 1 (1%) accuracy needed lots of expert tuning of the sensing circuit and the ADC firmware.