Advanced Bus Failure Management for the Physical Layer of CAN

A new bus failure management (BFM) for the Controller Area Network (CAN) is presented. In addition to the existing fault confinement of CAN, the task of a BFM is to resolve or get around faults on the physical layer. This paper discusses existing BFM proposals and outlines the superior characteristics of the new BFM. Systems using this technique overcome any single bus fault and maintain their communication capability by means of fast recovery actions. Low-cost implementations of this concept are possible in hardware. A performance comparison between this and existing BFM concepts is given. The paper concludes with evaluation results revealing the excellent performance of a CAN system using the proposed BFM concept in a monolithic transceiver.