A party full of new ideas: 30 years of CiA!
Uwe Koppe re-elected technical director
After a long period of online meetings, we were able to meet in person again in the beginning of June: (re-)establish relationships or simply talk to each other where you usually write emails. People took the opportunity: 30 years of the user organization CiA!
About 60 participants from 36 member companies and nine CiA experts celebrated the CiA anniversary in Nuremberg, and took the opportunitiy for networking, exchange information and ideas in teh two-day event.
A tour of CANopen FD
In the second part, Christian Schlegel (CS Consulting) and Uwe Koppe (MicroControl) talked about the development and prospects of classic CANopen and CANopen FD: in comedian-star quality the MicroControl CEO took the audience on a tour of of CANopen FD, presenting the advantages of the new FD technology. His interpretation of the film “The Fast and the Furious” was packed with funny citations from the film and pictures.
In the general assembly Uwe Koppe, Christian Schlegel and Holger Zeltwanger have been re-elected as CiA Technical Director, CiA Business Director and CiA Managing Director. The permanent memebers of the Technical Committee are Bosch, Emotas, Emsa, ESD and NXP. Emotas, Emsa, ESD, HMS and Vector have been elected as permanent members of the Business Committee.
Dipl.-Ing. Uwe Koppe, Head of Development at MicroControl, has been re-elected as technical director of the CiA.
More than 730 members – 25,000 pages of specifications and recommendations
Retrospective: in their first meeting in January 1992, 23 companies discussed issues regarding compatibility of the first CAN products. At that time, there were no standadized transceivers or higher layer protocols for CAN. Two months later, the CiA was founded. Since then, the number of CiA memebers has risen to more than 730. The CiA has issued more than 25,000 pages of specifications and recommendations, more than 120 editions of the CAN-Newsletter magazine and organized 17 international CAN-Conferences (iCC).
CAN and the new opportunities
Perspectives: When Dr. Arthur Mutter (Bosch) compared the features of the three CAN generations, referred to the improvements which the development of CAN XL has brought about – which was only possible thanks to the committment of the independent CiA assosiation. Within the CAN XL frame additional fields have been added which offer a maximum payload of up to 2048 bits. It is not possible to separate different pieces of the data within a frame. e.g. the priority and the CAN identifier are now addresed by two separate fields. The newly introduced SDT function (Service Data Unit Type) allows several CAN based network layer protocols being run on the same bus. Another new feature in CAN XL is VCID (Virtual CAN Network ID), which enables the logic division of the CAN network into severeal virtual networks. A CAN SIC XL (Signal Improvement Capability) transceiver can be used to reach bit rates of 10 Mbit/s and higher.
Magnus Hell (Infineon) presented the different physical layer options in the history of the CAN transceivers. Afterwards, Matthias Muth (NXP) compared the features of CAN SIC and CAN SIC XL transceivers in terms of possible bit rates and topological limitations. In the next presentation, Fred Rennig (STMicroelectronics) gave an insight into CAN FD Light which facilitates industrial applications due to a simplified CAN-FD data connection layer.
MicroControl GmbH & Co. KG – Systems provider for Automatisierung – founded 1997 and start of membership of CAN in Automation
