Electronic – How to make a model of a single wire CAN bus cable

cancapacitanceinductanceresistancetransmission line

I'm currently working on a project of analyzing the latency of a CAN bus network with transceivers and without transceivers. The latency parameter here will be analyzed with the effect of bus line length variations (2 m, 5 m, 8 m, 10 m, and so on). I'm trying to figure out the maximum bus length that a "non-transceiver" CAN bus network can work with.

The "non-transceiver" CAN bus network requires a single wire bus line. I'm using this application note as my reference to build the "non-transceiver" network, the figure of a CAN bus without a transceiver will describe what I meant by "single wire". mikrocontroller.net/attachment/28831/siemens_AP2921.pdf

As you can see from the document, it is stated that the "non-transceiver" CAN bus can only work for only << 1 m bus length, but I've found someone has used this "non transceiver" network for a 4 m bus line, and it worked. So there's no scientific proof of the statement of "it is only usable for << 1 m". My goal here is to find the maximum bus length for the "non-transceiver" bus length.

(I've tried the "non-transceiver" network and it worked. The CAN nodes can communicate to each other.)

I'm having a problem with making the equivalent circuit (model) of single wire bus for a certain bus length (let's say 10 m for an example). What is the resistance and the inductance for the model? How do I make the calculations? Can somebody help me with this?

Best Answer

I don't think the actual cable latency will be the issue. It's more likely to be the speed of the rising edges you get as the cable length increases. The capacitance of the cable will be of the order of 100 pF/m for coax. I'm neglecting the resistance of the cable.

So, the RC time constant will be ~330 ns at 1 m and ~1300 ns at 4 m. Assuming that it takes maybe three RC time constants to reach the threshold voltage of the receiver, that's about 1 µs/m.

So, even at 1 m cable length, I think it'll struggle to work at 1 Mbit/s (as the time to settle is approaching the bit-time). At 10 kbit/s I can't see why it wouldn't work over longer cables.

-- Update --

I should also mention there are proper single-wire CAN physical layers available for use at low bit rates, for example the NXP NCV7356