On a software-defined CAN controller for embedded systems

Controller Area Network (CAN) technology is nowadays ubiquitous in vehicular applications and is also gaining popularity in other contexts, for instance, embedded and industrial automation systems. The recent standardization of CAN with flexible data rate (CAN FD), as well as other academic proposals, have highlighted the usefulness of enhancing the CAN physical and data link layers to attain better performance and other features. This paper describes a portable software-defined CAN controller called SDCC. Besides being handy as a research tool for experimenting with novel protocol concepts at the data link layer, SDCC is also fully capable of real-time execution. Hence, it can interact with real-world CAN devices through a physical bus interface.