Product Selection | One Chip, Four Terminal Hotspots: GXCAS New Meter Thermal Sensing Solution

New Thermal Sensing Solution Empowers Meter Terminal Safety

The popularity of high-power appliances and household charging piles brings frequent load fluctuations and large instantaneous power peaks. Poor contact or aging wiring in smart meters increases contact resistance. Under unstable current surges, meter terminals heat abnormally, which may burn meters and trigger fire hazards.

Grid standards now mention terminal temperature monitoring, and provincial meter operators raise new requirements. The industry is shifting from post-fault protection to early thermal warning, and from manual inspection to condition-based maintenance. GXCAS launches a single-chip 4-terminal sensing solution. Its local-plus-remote architecture monitors four hotspots (A/B/C phases and N neutral terminal) simultaneously with one chip.

Limits of Traditional Sensing & Rise of IC-based Temperature Measurement

Traditional NTC solutions suffer from low accuracy, signal delay, high power consumption, complex circuits, poor EMI immunity and limited multi-point monitoring. The new solution uses an on-chip local reference plus simple low-cost remote diode sensors attached to terminals. All signals are converted on-chip via digital I²C interface, eliminating op-amps, ADCs and complex calibration, cutting BOM and routing difficulty.

GXCAS: One Chip for Four Terminal Temperature Monitoring

GXCAS GXTR304 local & remote temperature sensing chip delivers a precise, practical solution for meter terminal thermal monitoring.

“Local-plus-remote” means the chip measures its own local temperature plus four remote diode points, with independent programmable control for all channels. It triggers alarms once temperatures exceed thresholds. Integrated functions include series resistance cancellation, programmable η-factor correction and temperature offset calibration. One chip reads four terminals: A/B/C phases and N neutral wire, perfectly matching meter multi-terminal monitoring needs.

Compared with discrete designs, it offers higher integration to replace multiple sensing circuits for compact meter hardware. Fully digital output resists strong EMI inside meter housings. Local accuracy reaches ±0.5℃ and remote channels ±1℃, meeting thermal monitoring and early warning requirements. The localized design ensures stable supply for mass production.

This solution reshapes meter maintenance logic. Real-time thermal tracking detects hidden faults such as poor contact, overload and terminal aging for graded early alerts, preventing risks in advance. Long-term thermal data enables terminal degradation models, pinpointing high-risk devices and lowering grid maintenance cost for refined distribution management.

Application Value & Outlook

As new power systems develop, smart meters evolve beyond metering to serve as the first line of household power safety. GXCAS single-chip multi-terminal local & remote sensing solution has been mass deployed by leading meter customers. Featuring minimal hardware, domestic controllability, high stability and multi-point synchronous sensing, it upgrades smart meters from simple metering to full-condition perception and proactive safety protection.