There is an increasing utilisation of Controller Area Network (CAN) Bus in spacecraft onboard applications as the main system bus. It has already been successfully used in many missions (SMART-1, MATROSHKA, SSTL Satellites), and will soon be launched in ATV. CAN Bus provides numerous advantages (robust, low cost, low power consumption, European, etc.), but still one of its drawbacks is that a galvanic isolated implementation was until now only possible by means of optical-couplers. Unfortunately, optical-couplers may not be well suited for space applications that require very high radiation hardness. However, a new promising and innovative isolation technique, implemented in iCouplers from Analog Devices, is available in the COTS market. These devices provide isolation based on chip-scale transformers rather than on the optical leds and photodiodes used in optocouplers. The promising results of the low-dose-rate radiation tests that we have performed on these devices are presented in this paper.
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