Smart Grids and Energy Storage Systems: Powering the Future of Energy In today’s rapidly evolving energy landscape, the push towards sustainability, efficiency, and reliability is stronger than ever. Traditional power grids, though robust in their time, are no longer sufficient to meet the demands of a modern, digital, and environmentally conscious society. This is where smart grids and energy storage systems (ESS) come into play — revolutionizing how electricity is generated, distributed, and consumed. What is a Smart Grid? A smart grid is an advanced electrical network that uses digital communication, automation, and real-time monitoring to optimize the production, delivery, and consumption of electricity. Unlike conventional grids, which operate in a one-way flow (from generation to end-user), smart grids enable a two-way flow of information and energy. Key Features of Smart Grids: Real-time monitoring of power usage and quality. Automated fault detection and rapid restoration. Int...
Direct Memory Access
* For devices that moves large quantities of data ( such as disk controllers ), it is wasteful to tie up the CPU transferring data in and out of registers one byte at a time.
* Instead this work can be off-loaded to a special processor, called as the Direct Memory Access, DMA, Controller.
* The host issues a command to the DMA controller, implicating the location where the data is located, the location where the data is to be moved to, and the number of bytes of data to moved. The DMA controller handles the data moved, and then interrupts the CPU when the transfer is complete.
* A simple DMA controller is a quality component in modern PCs, and many bus-
mastering I/O cards contain their possess DMA hardware.
* Handshaking between DMA controllers and their devices is fulfil by two wires called the DMA-request and DMA-acknowledge wires.
* While the DMA moves is going on the CPU does not have process to the PCI bus (including main memory ), but it does have process to its internal registers and primary and secondary caches.
* DMA can be complete in terms of either physical addresses or virtual addresses that are mapped to physical addresses. The latter method is known as Direct Virtual Memory Access, DVMA, and permits direct data transfer from one memory-mapped device to another without having the main memory chips.
* Direct DMA access by user processes can speed up operations, but is normally forbidden by modern systems for protection and security reasons. ( I.e. DMA is a kernel-mode operation. )
* Figure below shows the DMA process.
