8Mbps power line communication with PLC \ Homeplug

Question

I'm trying to design a circuit to transmit data over the power lines. The data I'm trying to send is real time FFT of about 100k samples per second, for 32bit data this comes to about 3.2Mbit data per second.

I have found various ICs that implement a PLC communication front-end but the maximum speed they can deliver is about 500k baud/sec. Now I know there are various Ethernet power line communication modules available commercially, so my question is: how is this implemented if not with a dedicated IC.

I was unable to find any specific information about this on the web. Have not searched for books yet though. Do they use specialized ICs not available to the general public?

Answer 1

The problem is the other way around: most of the general public doesn't want to buy homeplug compatible modem IC's and so most of the IC's are restricted to manufacturers like broadcom\qualcomm who mostly deal with higher volume customers. (Like the BCM30321).

Look for homeplug IC's and IEEE 1901 which is the standard. Homeplug (the not green version) goes to 200Mbps. (also the 200Mbps is assuming a good pathway, which is not always the case with home/commercial wiring and YMMV as this rate is negotiated and depends on the noise on the lines and distance between devices)

There are also some non monolitic IC options here

To actually implement a product around one of these IC's would probably take 2-3 people just because of the time and effort it would be a lot to take on.