EPN Automotive Electronics Blog

CAN and LIN out of the palm

In vehicle assembly or the manufacture of mechatronic assemblies and systems it is often the case that operating functions must be executed at units to be mounted in vehicles without availability of related ECUs and control elements. This is the moment for a handheld terminal supporting those bus systems.

The three-bus board

Among the most critical points in automotive electronics are intersections of different bus systems. Those areas need to be designed and tested thoroughly – and it’s a bonus when the development device can be used in all stages, even in production.

Testing ECUs

Modern cars consist of dozens of electronic control units. This modular architecture facilitates development and manufacturing as well as after-sales service. Even testing isn’t too hard, except when it comes to interactions between the modules. At that point, functional testing needs to go hand in hand with communications analysis.

Signal conditioning

Among the most used electronic components in modern cars are sensors. Since they are omnipresent, they came into focus for space saving. Most (analogue) sensing components can’t shrink much but the ‘back end’ like signal conditioning can.

Extensible prototyping

While automotive electronics makes driving much more comfortable, »electronified« modern cars also have shorter lifetime and design time than »oldtimers«. So, the new car with the heatable cigarette lighter won’t last for 20+ years like but we won’t have to wait 10 years for the successor. Development tools need to develop even faster…

A tiny controller in a big car

More electronics, increasingly complex software: Modern cars are embedded systems on wheels. While communication between ECUs (Electronic control units) and other on-board systems has become more or less standardized with bus systems like CAN, LIN and sometimes already MOST and Flexray , there are still many proprietary communication solutions in the powertrain area.

Measuring LIN

While LIN is the PHY- and protocol-wise the simplest of the currently used bus systems in cars, more often than not analysing systems know more about CAN , Flexray or even MOST than about the uncomplicated two-wire connection.

Two transceivers for two wires

Over the last years, LIN has gained significant global interest beyond its initial roots in the European automotive industry. The wide availability of tools which support design, development, simulation, analysis, calibration and testing of distributed networks have been the driving factors for the success of the cost-effective de-facto standard LIN. Even though the physical layer is very simple and due to the simplicity of the protocol there is not much need for processing units, no semiconductor manufacturer would want to miss the enormous volume. That’s why Microchip , specialized in unpretentious high-tech like 8-Bit-Microcontrollers, announced two stand-alone Transceivers for LIN 2.1 and SAE J2602 these days. The company’s promise: The low-power transceivers exceed German automotive manufacturer requirements.