CAN FD monitoring module is for Yokogawa’s ScopeCorder family
The 720242 module supports higher-speed testing to meet future automotive requirements, says Yokogawa Europe. The CAN FD monitoring module for the ScopeCorder family of portable data acquisition and recording instruments is a plug-in module that is compatible with the DL850EV (Vehicle Edition or VE) instrument and Yokogawa’s DL350 ScopeCorder fitted with the VE option.
Using a ScopeCorder with bus monitor modules to decode data from automotive serial buses such as controller area networks (CAN), engineers are able to display information such as engine temperature, vehicle speed and brake pedal position as trend waveforms and compare this with the analogue data coming from the actual sensors. As a result, says Yokogawa, automotive engineers can gain a thorough insight into the dynamic behaviour of the complete electromechanical system.
CAN FD (CAN with flexible data rate) is an extension of CAN in which the transfer rate and data length of the data field has been increased while still following a protocol common to CAN. It enables data rates higher than one Mbit per second to be transmitted on a CAN bus and is able to deliver the higher bandwidths now required by the automotive industry for in-vehicle networks. Yokogawa already supports CAN FD triggering and decoding in its range of DLM mixed signal oscilloscopes for physical layer bus development.
Some automotive manufacturers in the US, Europe and Asia are planning to implement CAN FD as early as model year 2018, with a wider adoption expected in 2020. This means that automobile engineers are now free to consider CAN FD to meet the needs for higher data rates in automotive buses especially with regard to electric/hybrid vehicles where new powertrain concepts demand a much higher bit-rate and utilisation.
“The implementation and commissioning of CAN FD systems into actual vehicles requires either multiple instruments or a single versatile multi-channel instrument like the ScopeCorder to monitor the signals on the bus and display these together with those from the sensors along with data from the engine control unit (ECU)”, says Terry Marrinan, vice president Yokogawa’s Test & Measurement Business Unit for Europe & Oceania and South-East Asia. “This is necessary in order to analyse the complete system and check that it and its latencies, for example, are operating as predicted and to find the cause of errors”, he adds. Yokogawa claims to be the first test and measurement company to offer this level of CAN FD capability on an instrument of this type.
The module is also compatible with classical CAN and will replace the existing 720240 CAN-only model.
Yokogawa was the first test and measurement manufacturer to provide automotive serial bus analysis on any oscilloscope. The introduction of support for this extension of the CAN bus is an indication of the company’s ongoing commitment to satisfy the needs of the automotive and transportation industries.
