Multiple RS-485 interface management FPGA design for Power micro-metering

UART is most widely used communication method in various industrial applications because of its simple structure, low cost, and easy usability. In energy management and control applications, a power meter is installed on each distributed power lane in the power distribution panel and power quality data are measured using UART communication. However, the data acquisition time drastically increases as the number of power meters increases due to the sequential data transfer of UART communication. In this paper, we propose a fast power micro-metering technique using parallel RS-485 interfaces architecture. We have verified the effectiveness of the proposed technique through a testbed implementation.