It has now been more than 15 years since auto-electronics maker Robert Bosch developed the CAN (controller-area-net-work) protocol to communicate between electronic-control units within powertrain-control applications. Following its introduction at the SAE (Society of Automotive Engineers) Congress in 1986, Bosch licensed the protocol to a variety of equipment manufacturers and silicon fabricators. The first licensee was Intel, whose 82526 in 1987 became the first commercially available CANbus controller; other early adopters include Philips and Motorola. Bosch has since signed more than 40 licensees, and the protocol enjoys established ISO status (Reference 1). The technology's applications have broken free of the automotive arena to include industrial networking, medical equipment, numerical machine control, railway signalling, controlling building services, and even vending machines―any application that requires robust communications with predictable latencies at bit rates reaching 1 Mbps.
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