LONDON – Xsilon Ltd., a 2008 startup, has announced it is offering in-home machine-to-machine powerline communications technology.
Xsilon (Bath, England) is developing a physical layer circuit to operate in the 2- to 30—MHz carrier range. The technology is named Hanadu from HAN standing for home-area network.
Key application areas for Hanadu include smart meter connectivity in mainstream environments as well as in difficult building deployments, in-home energy management solutions, appliance monitoring and maintenance applications, and telemedicine services.
Ad hoc topologies are supported with auto-discovery routing algorithms, and the bandwidth scales to support many dozens of connected end-points within a single home or building. Xsilon claims it can achieve radically lower power consumption for a powerline modem, a tenth of the typical 4 to 5-watts, and a small form factor that would allow it to be included within an electricity plug or small consumer equipment. The Hanadu system includes network security to maintain householders' privacy, the company said.
Xsilon said it has generated its own intellectual property in designing Hanadu, and it will be opening the technology up to standardization activities in the near future.
First products will allow vendors and service providers to evaluate the connectivity advantages of Hanadu technology, followed by connectivity modules for integration into OEM products. Dual-mode solutions are also being designed, allowing deep integration with other connectivity solutions such as WiFi, ZigBee and Ethernet.
The HAN9000 Connectivity Evaluation Kit will be ready for shipment to customers in 3Q12. It uses a modular design to accommodate the varying needs of different customers. Each CEK unit is approximately 27-cm by 13-cm in area, which encompasses all the network interface technology, power supplies and data processing modules. Accompanying software allows connection throughput and link integrity to be logged, monitored and analyzed. Early applications will be addressed by Xsilon’s first connectivity product, the HAN1250 module which will launch in 2013.
Related links and articles:
www.xsilon.com