A LOW COST AND FLEXIBLE APPROACH TO CAN CONFORMANCE TESTING

Imran Sheikh, Michael Short

2009

Abstract

Since its introduction in the early 1980’s, CAN has become the de-facto communications protocol employed in vehicle and industrial control applications. Before any new product can claim to support CAN-connectivity, compliance with the protocol at the physical and data link layers must be tested and verified. To help standardize the requirements for such testing, ISO has set a draft standard specifically for CAN conformance testing. Traditionally, CAN controllers and transceivers have been implemented at the silicon level, either in the form of dedicated IC’s or as on-chip peripherals of embedded devices. The practical implementation of CAN conformance testers has been realised using dedicated hardware and specially written analysis software; this is a practical approach when testing and verifying conformance prior to high-volume IC manufacture. However, recent years have seen an increased interest in the employment of CAN-connected devices implemented by programmable logic devices such as FPGA’s. Such ‘soft core’ implementations are often in small-volume (or even one-off) batches. In such circumstances, for cost and availability reasons, it may not be practical for developers to use traditional CAN-conformance testing equipment. To help alleviate this problem, this paper proposes a low-cost and easily implemented method which will allow developers to fully test a CAN soft core implementation. The method is based around simple off-the-shelf development boards and the simple analysis tool Chipscope, and allows developers to verify a CAN core against the relevant ISO standards. Finally, the paper describes the use of the test bed in the verification of an open-source CAN soft core implementation.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Sheikh I. and Short M. (2009). A LOW COST AND FLEXIBLE APPROACH TO CAN CONFORMANCE TESTING . In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics - Volume 3: ICINCO, ISBN 978-989-8111-99-9, pages 97-104. DOI: 10.5220/0002215300970104

in Bibtex Style

@conference{icinco09,
author={Imran Sheikh and Michael Short},
title={A LOW COST AND FLEXIBLE APPROACH TO CAN CONFORMANCE TESTING},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics - Volume 3: ICINCO,},
year={2009},
pages={97-104},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0002215300970104},
isbn={978-989-8111-99-9},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics - Volume 3: ICINCO,
TI - A LOW COST AND FLEXIBLE APPROACH TO CAN CONFORMANCE TESTING
SN - 978-989-8111-99-9
AU - Sheikh I.
AU - Short M.
PY - 2009
SP - 97
EP - 104
DO - 10.5220/0002215300970104