**Abstract**

The reliability of intelligent electronic device (IED) function that ensures a particular disturbance will disconnect as fast enough from the healthy network to mitigate the effect of the fault is directly related to the reliability of the electrical system. This work aims to test the performance and comparison between the developed Light weight IED and different commercial IEDs from different vendor. The developed light weight IEDs are implemented on a microcontroller as well as on an FPGA. The test set-up is implemented by the Hardware-In-the-Loop platform. The simulation platform is OPAL-RT's eMEGASIM. The results shows the performance of the FPGA to be better than microcontroller and other commercial IEDs when comparing results.

**Keywords:** IEC 61850, light weight IED, smart grid, communication system, real-time simulation, hardware-in-the-loop
