Hosted by ECN’s Editorial Director, Alix Paultre, the Tinker’s Toolbox is ECN’s web-based interview show where we talk about the latest technology, components, and design issues for the electronic design engineering community.
On the 25th anniversary of the controller area network (CAN) interface standard, we talk to Jean Anne Booth and Scott Monroe of Texas Instruments about CAN and what it means to the industry today as well as into the future.
An excellent example of how flexible and adaptable a useful protocol can become, CAN is amazingly flexible and resilient. When Bosch originally presented the protocol at SAE in February 1986, it was targeted for the automotive industry, but today the technology is widely utilized in applications including industrial, control, medical, maritime and transportation.
Here is another link to the podcast: TI CAN interview
Here are some related links:
https://e2e.ti.com/blogs_/default.aspx
Here’s a blog post by Scott Monroe and Thomas Leyrer on the CAN anniversay:
As we look back on the first 25 years of controller area network (CAN), it is amazing to see how flexible and adaptable it has become. When Bosch originally presented the protocol at SAE in February 1986, it was targeted for the automotive industry, but today the technology is widely utilized in applications including industrial, control, medical, maritime and transportation. This time the protocol hardware (ISO11989-1, controller peripheral) has been integrated into many embedded control processor platforms, such as Texas Instruments’ (TI) C2000™ microcontrollers (MCUs), Stellaris® ARM® MCUs and Sitara™ ARM microprocessors (MPUs). With this hardware support, plus many software stacks such as Vector, CANopen, CAN Kingdom, DeviceNet and others supporting it, CAN is pervasive within the embedded processor space while providing a robust performance at a great price and performance point.
Technology in cars and machines do not stop where CAN reaches its limits. Bosch is promoting TTCAN to address higher end applications requiring more determinism. Higher data rates, time synchronization and determinism are driving factors for the new standard. Generating the strongest momentum on industrial Ethernet today, EtherCAT is the one protocol (out of 29) possessing the ability to be the CAN successor. The EtherCAT Technology Group just passed 1,500 members worldwide with TI included.
TI developed products with three different CAN technologies over the years. Mainly driven from automotive applications like ABS and engine control, we started to integrate CAN controller into TMS370 (RPP CAN), TMS470 (HECC) and TMS570 (DCAN) family. Product groups outside automotive have taken the existing CAN modules and integrated them onto their chips. Today, we see CAN as a standard peripheral on C2000 MCU, Stellaris ARM MCU and Sitara ARM MPU platforms.
In addition, TI has also developed 3V CAN products, such as the SN65HVD23x devices that are compatible but operate from only a 3.3V supply, reducing component count and system cost. Another recent trend is system “shrinkage” via smaller packaging for CAN, such as the SN55HVD251 and SN65HVDA1040A in VSON packaging. (More information atwww.ti.com/CAN)
The number of parts with CAN interfaces TI ships is huge and the total market is staggering. To give you some idea of the number, most ABS systems actually have a minimum of two CAN interfaces now, and at least one CAN controller (protocol peripheral) is on every automotive MCU or DSP TI ships. Then factor in industrial MCUs and DSPs, as well as CAN XCVRs – that’s a lot of CAN!
With more than 600 million CAN devices added last year, this technology is still growing at very high rate. Look for TI to continue to innovate in silicon implementations of CAN technology, both standalone and in our system-on-chip (SoC) implementations, such as the ones in our high speed analog, C2000 MCU, Stellaris ARM MCU and Sitara ARM MPU platforms.