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Europe Holds CAN FD Tech Day CAN in Automation (CiA) organised the CAN FD Tech Day Europe in Frankfurt, Germany. More than 80 attendees listened to 10 speakers introducing the CAN FD protocol and discussing requirements. Application cases in automotive as well as industrial control systems were also discussed. Friedhelm Pickard, president of Etas, gave in his keynote speech a historical review of the CAN technology and introduced the requirements for higher speed and larger payload. In more detail, Harald Eisele, chassis system electronics controls integration engineer, from Opel and Dr Marc Schreiner, from Daimler’s research and development division, discussed the requirements of the automotive industry. Dr Tobias Lorenz, open source expert, Etas and Alexander Philipp, software engineer, Port also presented use cases for nonautomotive applications of the CAN FD protocol. Same Chip Coexistence There was some discussion about the coexistence of classic CAN controllers and CAN FD chips in the same network. One of the options is the use of selective wake-up transceivers, which is the direction Opel has decided to adopt. This means all engine control units will be equipped with an ISO 11898-6 compliant transceiver.
Florian Hartwich from Bosch introduced the CAN FD protocol and its functionality. In a separate room Bosch, Etas, Kvaser, Peak, and Vector demonstrated the first CAN FD implementations. In the evening before the event, the companies linked their compatible products to one network. This was so-to-say the first informal CAN FD plug-fest. Conference Announcements In the one-day conference, Francesco Sindaco, director of marketing CAN/LIN, NXP announced a family of CAN transceiver chips qualified for transmission rates up to 2 Mbit/s. In addition, the company will provide CAN transceivers with selective wake-up functionality (ISO 11898- compliant), which are CAN FD tolerant. They can be used for nodes supporting just the classic CAN protocol, so that they do not disturb the CAN FD communication. Radoslaw Watroba, applications engineer, from STMicroelectronics launched CAN FD support for its 32-bit microcontrollers, which will be available in Autumn 2013. There will be versions providing three M-CAN on-chip modules supporting the CAN FD protocol as well as one additional timetriggered CAN on-chip module (ISO 11898-4). Davide Santo from Freescale promised that the US chipmaker will also support the
CAN FD demo by Bosch with 12 nodes running at 10 Mbit/s at a 70 m bus topology.
CAN FD protocol, but this was not an official product release. The company is also developing CAN transceiver chips qualified for higher bitrates than 1 Mbit/s. Etas and Vector announced CAN FD support for their CAN tools. Etas’ Inca software products, tools for calibration, diagnostics, and validation of automotive electronic systems, will support the improved CAN protocol by the middle of 2014. Peter Decker, product manager, Vector stressed that the CANdb format is already prepared for payloads up to 64 bytes. The company uses in its CAN FD interface products its own bus controller implemented in a field programmable gate array. ENQUIRY NO. 4101 June/July 2013 | industrial automation asia 17