Migration from CAN to CAN FD - how to boost network performance

The CAN bus is a mature and well-established bus system that is used in many systems and has become the most important bus system in the automotive sector. The growing need for more bandwidth was the main motivation for the evolution to the new CAN FD bus. The migration to CAN FD may look like plug and play, because the CAN FD protocol is downward-compatible. However, new features and better performance never come without any drawback. That is why the full potential of the upgrade could stay hidden. In this paper we will highlight the most important facts for the hardware development of a system with a CAN FD protocol machine. We will discuss and analyze needed software configuration steps of the CAN FD bus speed and timing parameters. With this information a designer of an embedded system is able to create a powerful CAN FD solution which can be connected to overlying software layers.