C-3 : configurable CAN FD controller: architecture, design and hardware implementation

Abstract

CAN FD (Controller Area Network with Flexible Data Rate) is a new standard which provides a fast data rate while preserving the compatibility with CAN. In this paper, we propose the C-3 (Configurable CAN FD Controller) IP core architecture, which is compatible with the non-ISO CAN FD standard. C-3 supports up to 96 transmit and receive buffers. The transmit buffers are organized as mailboxes with CAN ID prioritization in frame transmission. A separate filter mask that can be configured by the user exists for each receive buffer. Different from existing CAN/CAN FD controllers, the numbers and sizes of transmit and receive buffers of C-3 can be configured at run time. To this end, C-3 enables the best use of a single controller hardware for different applications and enables improving the real-time communication performance. C-3 communicates with the host device over SPI without any specific interface requirements using the protocol that is developed in the scope of this paper. C-3 is implemented on an FPGA Evaluation Board and its functionality is verified at a data rate of 2 Mbps.