Kvaser was among several participants in the latest CAN XL plugfest, held in Detroit, Michigan on 25th April 2023. Organised by CAN in Automation (CiA), the international users and manufacturers group, the series of CAN XL plugfests tests the interoperability of CAN XL protocol controllers and CAN SIC XL transceivers. An approved standard for CAN XL is likely to be published next year.

Kvaser successfully tested in-house CAN-XL IP running on an FPGA on a small format board. Our physical layer installation made it easy to replace the existing CAN-driver with NXP’s newly-released CAN SIC XL driver. One question raised at the CAN-XL conference was whether it was possible to use galvanic isolation with CAN-XL. As our fully-galvanically isolated CAN XL test board demonstrated at speeds up to 20 MBit/s, it is.

Kent Lennartsson, research manager for Kvaser, commented: “Aside from testing the new CAN SIC XL drivers, participants trialed different cable layouts, including linear with drop lines and double star. Linear configurations work to 20 MBit/s.”

CAN XL is widely viewed as the future of CAN, following on from CAN FD and the original CAN protocol, Classical CAN. CAN XL supports any bitrate from 0.1 to 20 Mbit/s and retains key advantages of CAN such as collision-resolution by arbitration, a characteristic that makes it a simple, robust alternative for high speed real-time communication.