Abstract

Modern-day automotive systems provide a plethora of functions to help improve vehicle safety, performance and comfort. Design engineers create powertrains for advanced driver assistance systems, body electronics and lighting, infotainment and safety systems that include a large number of electronic control units (ECUs) to perform various electromechanical functions. ECUs exchange control and data-log information through in-vehicle network buses. Among network protocols such as Controller Area Network (CAN), Local Interconnect Network (LIN), FlexRay and Ethernet, the CAN bus remains the most popular choice given its ease of use, good common-mode noise rejection, priority-based messaging, bitwise arbitration to handle bus contention, and error detection and recovery features.

Until now, a majority of CAN transceivers deployed in vehicles have been based on a 5V driver and receiver supply. This is because the CAN physical layer (International Organization for Standardization [ISO] 11898-2:2024) and CAN component-level electromagnetic compliance (EMC) standard (International Electrotechnical Commission [IEC] 62228-3) provide specifications and pass/fail limits only for 5V-supplied CAN transceivers. There are subsystems that need a 5V power rail only for the CAN transceiver. A 3.3V-supplied CAN transceiver can simplify the power-stage designs of ECUs by eliminating the required 5V rail, while being fully interoperable with 5V CAN transceivers on the same network bus and meeting strict automotive EMC requirements. This white paper introduces TI’s TCAN3403-Q1 and TCAN3404-Q1 automotive-qualified and EMC-certified 3.3V CAN Flexible Data Rate (FD) transceivers.