DESIGN OF A CUSTOM ASIC INCORPORATING CAN™ AND 1 ...

stationary agricultural equipment, nautical machinery, textile machines, and other special-
purpose machinery such as production lines and machine tools.
Paralleling the growth in automobile electronics is the increasing number of electronic
control systems being used in vehicles with each new production year. This growth is partly due
to the customer’s wish for better safety and greater comfort and also partly due to the
government’s requirements for improved emission control and reduced fuel consumption. The
complexity of the functions implemented in these systems necessitates an exchange of data
between them. With conventional systems, data is exchanged by means of dedicated signal
lines, but this is becoming increasingly difficult and expensive as control functions become ever
more complex, and the use of dedicated connections does not scale as the number of electronic
control systems in each vehicle continues to increase. In the case of complex control systems
(such as Motronic) in particular, the number of connections cannot be increased much further.
To consider future developments aimed at overall vehicle optimization, it becomes
necessary to overcome the limitations of conventional control device linkage. This can only be
done by networking the system components using a serial data bus system. In the near future,
serial communication will also be used in mobile communication in order to link components
such as car radios, car telephones, navigation aids etc. to a central, ergonomically designed
control panel. The functions defined in the Prometheus project [31], such as vehicle-to-vehicle
and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication will depend largely on serial communication.
Whereas some of these devices and functions can only be implemented via CAN, the vast
majority can be accomplished with the use of both CAN and 1 – Wire® inter-communications.
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