US chip-maker Silicon Labs has said it has shipped four million Wirepas sub-GHz RF mesh IoT units for India’s advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) initiative, to go in smart electricity meters. The Indian government set new rules in 2021 to reduce losses and improve operational efficiencies. These include the introduction of smart meters as part of a nationwide AMI project. Around one million Wirepas-based chips from Silicon Labs have so far been deployed in meters; the country’s AMI scheme has seen seven million smart meters deployed, in total, since 2021.
IoT connectivity company Wirepas, selling a non-cellular mesh technology for industrial IoT, was spun-out of the University of Tampere, in Finland in 2010. It has notable support from chipmakers and module makers including Silicon Labs, u-blox, Nordic Semiconductor, and others. Clients include Fujitsu, Prologis, Wurth, Schaeffler, Orange, and Fagerhult. It offers both low and high-power IoT mesh technology (and uses ETSI-based 5G branding for the latter), and claims higher levels of scalability, reliability, and sustainability, compared with standard IoT technologies.
The mesh architecture, as followed by Wirepas, means each device on a network acts as an access point for the next – unlike centralised systems that connect IoT devices via a single base station. It claims “algorithms and a unique architecture” to be able to connect up to four billion devices on a single network – and, somewhat confusingly, “as many as 16 million networks”. The company has low-power and high-power mesh products, pitched as alternatives to cellular private 5G for both massive machine-type (mMTC) and ultra-reliable low-latency (URLLC) comms.
It is also responsible for the proprietary low-power Wirepas Massive (formerly Wirepas Mesh) technology, which works in unlicensed 2.4GHz spectrum, and has found decent support in the smart buildings and metering markets. Twelve months ago, it raised $22 million to amp-up its enterprise sales operation in global markets, in a funding round led by Highland Europe, with participation also from Amalfi, IQT, ETF Partners, KPN Ventures, Vito Ventures, and Vesa Laisi. It also raised €10 million in late 2021 from venture firms Karma and Tesi in Estonia and Finland.
The company has offices in Australia, Germany, Finland, France, India, and the US. Its business in India is a feather in its cap. Silicon Labs is putting its sub-GHz LPWAN mesh radios in its EFR32FG23 (FG23) system-on-chip (SoC). They pair expect “massive growth” in India as the AMI rollout, part of the country’s Revamped Distribution Sector Scheme (RDSS) to ensure metering meets rigorous standards, continues through 2025. The FG23 SoC meets sundry regulatory specifications, including compliance to Indian Standard IS 15959.
The Wirepas-based FG23 SoC offers cost efficiency, high reliability / resilience, and wide-area rural reach, it said. Silicon Labs said in a statement: “[It] has become an ideal solution for AMI deployments due to its infinite scalability, ultra-low power consumption, and ultra-resilience… The Wirepas network continuously adjusts to environmental changes, seamlessly optimizing data paths. Even after power outages, the network quickly restructures within minutes, reliably meeting utilities’ strict requirements for data delivery.”
Meter providers in India have been able to deliver “99.9 percent proven reliability”, it said. Ross Sabolcik, senior vice president of Silicon Labs’ industrial and commercial business unit, said: “We are proud to support India’s ambitious Advanced Metering Initiative with best-in-class performance for the modern smart metering demands of India’s energy sector. The FG23 SoC with Wirepas RF mesh offers distinct advantages, particularly in large, dense environments.”
Writing in a blog a couple of months back, Chad Steider, senior product marketing manager at Silicon Labs, said: “The scale and time frame in which the Indian government hopes to complete its smart grid initiative brings never-before-seen challenges… Wirepas and Silicon Labs aim to address these challenges by offering a connectivity solution that does not rely on any centralized infrastructure, such as base stations, routers, or concentrators. Instead, each smart meter is equipped with a network interface card (NIC) that runs the Wirepas connectivity software.
“Due to the nature of the Wirepas’ decentralized mesh network architecture, the FG23 memory footprint and high level of integration make it an almost perfect fit for these applications by reducing the cost and complexity of the NIC design. The FG23-based NIC communicates with the meter, typically using a standard protocol, such as DLMS, to read meter indexes and send configurations. Conversely, the NIC connects to a gateway via a fully automatic and decentralized multi-hop mesh network, where each meter can act as a router for other meters. The gateway then forwards the data to a head-end system (HES) or a meter data management (MDM) system, where the utility provider can access and analyze the data.”
