A Switched Capacitor Approach for Power Line Communication in Differential Networks

In this paper, a direct modulated Power Line Communication (PLC) technique is presented, which realizes the transmitter part by a switched-capacitor (SC) implementation. It is shown that in terms of energy, latency and costs, the presented transmission scheme is an improvement compared to state-of-the-art carrier based solutions. Two variants of the transmitter will be analyzed that use an unshielded twisted-pair (UTP) cable to connect the network nodes differentially, while the supply of the nodes is embedded simultaneously. These PLC approaches have been verified by a discrete component based demonstrator and by a transmitter test chip, fabricated in a 180nm HV-CMOS SOI technology.