Cost Effective LIN Bus Automotive Networking Microcontroller

The Can bus has been the default standard vehicle networking bus for more than a decade. Unfortunately it suffers from being relatively expensive and unnecessarily complicated for many non-critical control and communication functions. The LIN (Local Interconnect Network) bus represents a more appropriate engineering solution for many functions in vehicles, appliances and equipment.

To be able to develop optimized LIN applications a new 4-bit Dual-Task RISC Microcontroller was developed, which enables the capability to integrate all functions required for a LIN slave on a single IC. The complete integration of the LIN-transceiver, a voltage regulator, a microcontroller and various application specific blocks equivalent to the cost level of optimized state machines is now possible. This LIN 4-bit Dual-Task MCU combines the advantages of the state machine and classical MCU solution, which is efficiency, robustness and flexibility at a very low cost level.