Integration of a CAN bus in an Onboard Computer for Space Applications

The integration of CAN bus networks in space applications has gained interest over the past years because of its high reliability and cost effectiveness. The bus has already been integrated in some low earth orbit satellites with commercial off-the-shelf components, but the harsh environment in deep space demands a more reliable solution. That is why a radiation hardened design of a CAN transceiver and a CAN controller is being investigated. The transceiver is constructed with a radhard RS-485 transceiver and the CAN controller is implemented in a radhard FPGA by means of VHDL IP cores. For this paper, a CAN IP core from Gaisler Research is selected and implemented in an FPGA. Eventually, this design was successfully tested in simulations of a VHDL test bench as well as in a hardware test bench. These tests proved the fitness of the CAN controller for use in deep space applications.status: publishe