Low-Speed CAN

Low-Speed CAN is commonly used to control "comfort" devices in an automobile, such as seat adjustment, mirror adjustment, and door locking. It differs from High-Speed CAN in that the maximum baud rate is 125K and it utilizes CAN transceivers that offer fault-tolerant capability. This enables the CAN bus to keep operating even if one of the wires is cut or short-circuited because it operates on relative changes in voltage, and thus provides a much higher level of safety. The transceiver solves many common and frequent wiring problems such as poor connectors, and also overcomes short circuits of either transmission wire to ground or battery voltage, or the other transmission wire. The transceiver resolves the fault situation without involvement of external hardware or software. On the detection of a fault, the transceiver switches to a one wire transmission mode and automatically switches back to differential mode if the fault is removed.

Special resistors are added to the circuitry for the proper operation of the fault-tolerant transceiver. The values of the resistors depend on the number of nodes and the resistance values per node. For guidelines on selecting the resistor, refer to Cabling Requirements for Low-Speed/Fault-Tolerant CAN.