C3: configurable CAN FD controller: architecture, design and hardware implementation

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 C3 (Configurable CAN FD Controller) IP core architecture, which is compatible with the non-ISO CAN FD standard. C3 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 C3 can be configured at run time. To this end, C3 enables the best use of a single controller hardware for different applications and enables improving the real-time communication performance. C3 communicates with the host device over SPI without any specific interface requirements using the protocol that is developed in the scope of this paper. C3 is implemented on an FPGA Evaluation Board and its functionality is verified at a data rate of 2Mbps.