Design and implementation of remote terminal unit for feeder automation system with high performance microcontroller

The main purpose of this paper was to develop a DNP3.0 protocol based on the high performance remote terminal unit (RTU) which was applied to the feeder automation system of substations. As the efficiency of architecture and instruction set of microcontroller was low, a higher operating frequency and larger memory microcontroller was utilized as the control core of early RTU to improve the efficiency, so the cost was increased. Therefore, the advanced microcontroller would be used as the control core, which employed the Harvard architecture and pipeline processing technology to improve the system efficiency. The RTU proposed by this paper could measure the voltage and current of the feeder, monitor the feeder line branch switch status, digital relay, and utilize DNP3.0 and feeder automation host machine, Feeder remote terminal unit (FRTU), communication. This paper has finished the development of the prototype of RTU to verify the feasibility of the architecture proposed.