PCN Technology

PCN Technology’s system enables data to be transferred using existing wired networks that perform other functions.
By Brad Graves, San Diego Business Journal
Monday, January 31, 2011

Call someone a birdbrain and you might be paying them a compliment.

The electronics from PCN Technology Inc. mimic one feature of a bird brain. Far from being a drawback, it’s a selling point.

PCN offers a system to send information over wires built for and performing other functions, such as a building’s electrical power circuits.

To describe how it works, PCN President and Chief Executive Officer Venkat Shastri uses the example of birds communicating.

Birds adapt their communication style to fit the noisy environment around them. They wait for silent periods in time. Or they change the pitch of their calls so they can be heard through the din.

Shastri maintains that if he took birds from Brazil to New York City, they would adapt their calls to the city noise, finding frequencies and time slices they could occupy.

In the same way, PCN’s electronics find ways to communicate information along wires that already have a lot of electrical “noise,” such as power cables. The electronics repeatedly size up the noise characteristics of the line, then find a way to communicate in spite of them.

A product from PCN recently won high praise from Connect, the San Diego organization that provides a number of services to help technology businesses grow.

PCN’s IP-485 networking platform received Connect’s Most Innovative New Product Award of the year in the category of communications and information technology.

Now Showing
In the conference room of their Rancho Bernardo office on a recent Friday, Shastri and Daniel Drolet, a company co-founder, showed off the system’s capability for carrying video — in this case, the trailer from the film “Iron Man.” The executives used their technology to route signals from a video player elsewhere in the building, through the building’s 120-volt electrical wiring, and to the conference room video projector. The picture and sound were as clear as if the player had been hooked up directly.

Installation is easy, PCN executives say.

If a big defense contractor wanted to move into the building the next day, Shastri said, it could use PCN’s electronics to route signals from a newly installed security system, including access control electronics and video from security cameras, over the building’s electrical wiring. There would be no need to install new wires.

In addition to power supplies of varying voltages and other electrical gear, the lab at PCN’s Rancho Bernardo headquarters contains something akin to a cattle pen — it’s 1,000 feet of barbed wire strung around wood posts — for testing.

“If you give me a hunk of metal,” Shastri declares, “I can use that hunk of metal to communicate.”

Using Available Resources
PCN executives say they can adapt and reuse wiring to serve a number of vertical markets.

For example, a gas station owner might want to send more information to and from the pumps, but not want to jackhammer a trench to install more wiring.

With PCN’s electronics, a station owner can send signals over the existing wires supplying electricity to run the pumps. The signals might carry credit and debit card information, or video to a screen on the pump island. It might carry data from sensors in the underground fuel tanks.

If, in a few years, the station starts dispensing electricity for electric cars, the cables could carry data about the juice being transferred to cars’ batteries, Drolet said.

Shastri and Drolet said the firm could serve a number of vertical markets, including oil and gas, utilities and defense. They plan to sell their technology to vendors with expertise in their particular markets.

PCN executives say their technology is more robust than similar gear marketed for home use. What’s more, they say, it’s more reliable than wireless, where data can be lost or delayed. Drolet said reliability is imperative for industrial automation and control systems, such as those synchronizing robots in factories.

Flexible System
PCN officials say their technology can also piggyback information on top of Category 5 cables used to link computers.

Shastri and Drolet say their product is in tune with the times.

As something that finds a new use for existing materials, the technology is green, they say. It recycles old pieces of the electrical infrastructure.

They say the technology might also carry information to enable the “smart grid” — that is, the power distribution system of the future which, because of two-way communication, can operate with peak efficiency.

Terry Mohn of General MicroGrids said he was introduced to PCN Technology’s system a few years ago while he was at San Diego Gas & Electric Co. At the time he was evaluating promising technology for smart grid systems.

He said he reviewed a lot of technology then — but PCN stood out. Mohn said it offered the right combination of security, reliability and cost-effectiveness.

At some point, communication systems get too expensive to install on the power system, said Mohn. “You can’t run a twisted-pair phone line everywhere.”

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