The Controller Area Network (CAN) invented by Bosch in 1983 is a serial field bus protocol
which was originally used in road vehicles and now is widely applied in other industrial
fields. Since its birth automotive electronic engineers have been use Microcontrollers (MCU) to
control the CAN bus. Today as the Field-programmable Gate Array (FPGA) has become very advance
this book introduces a new method which uses an FPGA and a MCU jointly instead of a single MCU
is to design a CAN bus measurement system. Furthermore the designed system should be able to
work at the fastest possible speed. Chapter 1 of this book is the introduction which includes
the background objective and outline of this book. Chapter 2 describes the CAN protocol
development history and fundamentals such as application field architecture layers different
frame structures frame coding error handling and fault confinement which are extracted from
the CAN Specification 2.0 and ISO 11898. It helps reader to understand the CAN. Chapter 3
studies the effective data transmission rate and ratio of the CAN bus and the MCU serial UART
port. Then it compares their values and draws a conclusion. This chapter is the most important
theory research of this book. Chapter 4 describes the devices used in the experiments of the
book. There are five major devices applied: an Altera FPGA a 5-3.3 V level translator an
Atmel CAN MCU a NI CAN USB and a PC with LabVIEW environment. Chapter 5 demonstrates the
software development procedure for the whole system including FPGA with Quartus II MCU with
Keil C51 and NI CAN BUS with LabVIEW. Chapter 6 describes the testing experiments of the
measurement system. It analyses a common error ignored during the MCU programming and shows how
to solve it. After the reprogramming three tests and their results are illustrated. Chapter 7
presents the final conclusion of this book which is that the measurement system designed here
maximally utilizes the CAN effective data transmission rate and ratio and could be applied in
control systems of electric vehicles.
