Smart Meter Drives Rapid Growth in Industrial Semiconductor Chip Market

The smart meter is an important part of smart power, and it is the “end-of-the-art” that enables two-way interactive smart power. It supports two-way metering, automatic collection, step price, time-of-use price, freezing, control, and monitoring. In addition, smart energy meters can also provide users with many power services, including distributed power metering, interactive services, smart homes, and smart communities.

In 2012, the shipment volume of smart meter chips reached 53.339 million, an increase of 56.6% year-on-year; the scale of the power carrier chip market reached 770 million yuan, an increase of 45.5% year-on-year. This increase was mainly due to the government’s massive investment in infrastructure since April 2012, and the nation’s full implementation of the ladder price system in July. With the gradual promotion of applications such as IoT smart home, smart security, and broadband networks, the demand for smart meters will increase rapidly. It is expected that smart meter procurement activities will maintain its growth momentum, and the installation speed will accelerate in the next three years.

In October 2009, the State Grid Corporation of China announced a new technology standard system for smart meters, which consists of 12 technical standards including functional specifications, technical specifications, type specifications, and safety certification specifications. This standard system has detailed regulations on metering, fee control, communication, power consumption, and even the wiring and appearance of electronic circuits, and has put forward higher requirements.

The smart meter chip involves control, metering, encryption, and communication chips (narrow-wave communication). The control chip is the core of the entire program and is responsible for the most important functions such as tariff calculation, control display, and communication.

In order to strengthen the management and control of smart meter quality, a number of new technical standards are expected to be implemented in the third quarter. By then, all meter manufacturers must adopt new practices. However, in order to prevent the market from possible turbulent, more stringent requirements only involve the sample delivery procedure.

But as previously anticipated, in response to these changes, the entire smart meter semiconductor market is reshuffled. Even before these new standards were issued, almost all smart meter semiconductor manufacturers had adjusted their product strategies to prepare for the new standards.

Due to these factors, the market has undergone significant changes. For example, as of the end of last year, the market share of smart meter microcontroller (MCU) suppliers has changed in many ways compared to the first half of the year. At the same time, the suppliers of the two big two-hearted metering integrated circuits (ICs) further consolidated their respective markets, and the competitive landscape of the power line communication (PLC) chip market also changed.