Texas Instruments (TI) has announced the commercial availability of the TCAN6062, marking the industry’s first mass-market Controller Area Network Extended Data-Field Length (CAN XL) transceiver. Built to address soaring data volumes in factory automation, humanoid robotics, industrial manipulators, and human-machine interface (HMI) systems, the device delivers transmission speeds up to 20Mbps while expanding frame payload limits to 2,048 bytes.
The release translates the long-standardized CAN XL specification into commercially deployable silicon. By scaling bandwidth up to 32 times higher than the 64-byte payload barrier of CAN FD, the transceiver resolves throughput bottlenecks without abandoning the deterministic, priority-based bus arbitration that forms the foundation of mission-critical industrial networks.
Protocol Migration and Ethernet Consolidation
A major design priority of the TCAN6062 is backward compatibility across legacy CAN topologies. The transceiver operates seamlessly in mixed-bus networks alongside CAN Flexible Data Rate (CAN FD) and CAN Signal Improvement Capability (CAN SIC) devices. This capability allows hardware designers to deploy CAN XL in existing subsystems incrementally, avoiding the development cost and risk of complete architecture rebuilds.
Beyond raw bandwidth scaling, the TCAN6062 integrates Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) tunneling. This functionality allows engineers to bridge Ethernet packets directly over physical CAN wiring:
Consolidated Network Layers: Carries motor control trajectories, real-time sensor feedback, system diagnostics, and over-the-air (OTA) firmware updates across a single physical harness.
Predictable Latency: Maintains priority arbitration during bus contention, ensuring time-critical motion and safety commands retain immediate bus access over background diagnostic streams.
Signal Integrity and Robust Electrical Protection
Operating at signaling rates up to 20Mbps over multidrop copper cabling introduces complex transmission line reflections and signal degradation. To maintain signal fidelity in complex, high-node networks, the TCAN6062 incorporates CAN SIC hardware. This integrated circuitry suppresses signal ringing during dominant-to-recessive edge transitions by as much as 80%, substantially reducing validation complexity and bit-error rates in challenging wiring topologies.
From an integration and safety perspective, the device is engineered to withstand severe electrical noise and mechanical fault conditions common in automated plant environments:
Fault Tolerances: Features integrated DC bus-fault protection up to ±58V.
Interface Flexibility: Offers wide input/output (I/O) voltage compatibility, allowing direct interfacing with diverse low-voltage microcontroller and microprocessor logic levels without external level translators.
Standards Development and Industry Alignment
The physical layer design of the transceiver conforms to the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 11898-2:2024 standard. As active members of the CAN in Automation (CiA) technical working committee, TI engineers directly contributed to the physical-layer specifications underpinning CAN XL.
According to Arthur Mutter, Ph.D., chairman of the CAN XL Special Interest Group at CiA and senior executive at Bosch, CAN XL delivers superior data capacity compared to CAN FD while functioning as a cost-effective alternative that bridges industrial Ethernet tunneling. With volume production of the TCAN6062 underway, the transceiver provides industrial equipment designers with an accessible pathway to scale multi-axis motion and robotic intelligence at an optimized system cost.
