Renesas PLC IC chosen by Panasonic for railway lighting system

Panasonic and East Japan Railway Company jointly developed the system using G3-PLC, a narrowband standard (10-450kHz) for outdoor use. 

PLC makes it possible to transmit control signals over power lines, allowing operators to adjust the brightness and colour of lighting fixtures on platforms without requiring dedicated signal lines.

The system uses the device to make these adjustments in accordance with lighting conditions impacted by the time of day and weather.

The R9A06G037 is G3-PLC compliant and claimed to be exceptionally noise tolerant. It features a DSP for the PHY layer and other real time operations with 276MHz maximum clock frequency, 128KB of instruction RAM and 128KB of data RAM. 

The device also has an Arm-M3 for the MAC layer and upper layer operation. The MCU features 138MHz maximum clock frequency and 512KB of RAM. 

In addition to supplying the ICs, Renesas provided technical support including offering board circuit proposals and evaluation board-based improvements, supplying communication software for reference, supporting software development, and providing tools to evaluate the communication status. 

Yasunori Kawase, general manager of lighting systems department, lighting equipment business unit, lighting business division, life solutions company at Panasonic says “This was the first time we utilized narrowband PLC in a lighting system, and leveraging Renesas’ technical support and extensive experience using this technology in smart meters worldwide, we successfully completed all stages of the rollout process, from field testing to actual operation. I am confident that with the collaboration of Renesas, we will further expand the use of narrowband PLC in our lighting systems moving forward.”

Toru Moriya, vice president of emerging markets division, IoT and infrastructure business unit at Renesas “We worked closely to overcome the technical issues associated with communications systems, particularly noise challenges, and we are excited to now see the system actually running in the railway station system. We look forward to continuing our collaboration with Panasonic on the development of lighting control systems for a variety of environments.”