A CORDIC-based digital protective relay and its architecture

This paper presents new approach for a hardware architecture for a digital protective relay. All functions for the measurements and relay co-ordination can be calculated with a generalized COordinate Rotation DIgital Computer (CORDIC) algorithm instead of by approximation and extrapolation. The resulting protective relay has higher processing capability making it more able to handle parallel multi-channel sources than existing digital/numerical relays are. Co-ordination accuracy can be also improved by the use of the CORDIC algorithm. This architecture was successfully implemented in a 0.35 μm CMOS technology and then verified.