CAN FD: Anything But Automotive Only

By Bernd Westhoff, Renesas Electronic Corporation
EETimes (April 22, 2022)

Due to higher bandwidth requirements in the automotive field, the CAN (controller area networking) specification was extended for flexible data–rates with a new iteration known as CAN FD.

CAN offers advantages such as cost, flexibility, and robustness, all of which are very beneficial to non–automotive applications in many fields. The market opportunities are even wider with the CAN FD extension. This article covers the fundamentals of CAN and CAN FD and the different application implementations using varying physical layers or higher layer protocols with CAN as the data link layer.

First, let’s touch on the advantages of CAN over standard serial communication such as RS232 or RS485. Due to CAN’s higher communication speed with error detection, it offers excellent robustness and lower cost.

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