Integrated Device Technology (News - Alert), Inc. has collaborated with Fudan Microelectronics to provide a turn-key smart meter reference design to shorten the development cycle of smart meter manufacturers.

Company officials said that the new turn-key smart meter reference design will leverage IDT’s award-winning 90E2x wide-range power metering device and Fudan Microelectronics’ FM3308 microcontroller unit for next generation smart meter applications.

“With their high-performance and technologically superior metering devices, IDT is the ideal company for collaboration on this reference design,” said Lei Shen, deputy chief engineer of Fudan Microelectronics, in a press release.

“By combining IDT’s metering analog front-end with our latest MCU designed for smart meters, customers can quickly take the design into certification and mass production. This is especially valuable for meter manufacturers who have tight design bandwidth and schedule.”

The industry’s widest dynamic range of 5000:1 is offered by IDT’s 90E2x power metering IC. It helps meter manufacturers to simplify their product designs using a single IC and bill of materials instead of different ICs and BOMs for different meter types.

Comprised of an 8-bit TURBO 51 MCU core, program memory and RAM (News - Alert), LCD driver, RTC, UARTs, and hardware ISO 7816 protocol stack, Fudan Microelectronics’ FM3308 MCU chip, offers a competitive feature set, high-performance, and simplifies the circuit.

The new reference design meets or exceeds the Chinese standards and requirements for turn-key usage in a myriad of smart meter applications.

“IDT is responding to its customers’ demand for system solutions by partnering with a leading MCU supplier in China,” said Sean Fan, vice president and general manager of IDT China. “Through this collaboration, we are able to provide our customers with not only a turn-key solution, but also improved service from local perspective. Reference designs such as this allow us to accelerate our market penetration in smart meters for the global smart grid market.”

In related news, Integrated Device Technology, Inc. has released a new family of low-power spread spectrum clock generators.