AN754

DS00754A-page 4

 2001 Microchip Technology Inc.

SYNCHRONIZING THE BIT TIME

All nodes on the CAN bus must have the same nominal

bit rate. Noise, phase shifts, and oscillator drift create

situations where the nominal bit rate does not equal the

actual bit rate in a real system. Therefore, the nodes

must have a method for achieving and maintaining syn-

chronization with bus messages.

Oscillator Tolerance

The bit timing for each node in a CAN system is derived

creates a situation where phase shifting and oscillator

drift will occur between nodes due to less than ideal

oscillator tolerances between the nodes.

The CAN specification indicates that the worst case

oscillator tolerance is 1.58% and is only suitable for low

bit rates (125 kb/s or less). This application note does

not cover oscillator tolerances in detail, however, the

references at the end of this application note provide

more information on the subject.

Propagation Delay

The CAN protocol has defined a recessive (logic 1) and

dominant (logic 0) state to implement a non-destructive

bit-wise arbitration scheme. It is this arbitration method-

ology that is affected the most by propagation delays.

Each node involved with arbitration must be able to

sample each bit level within the same bit time. For

example, if two nodes at opposite ends of the bus start

to transmit their messages at the same time, they must

arbitrate for control of the bus. This arbitration is only

effective if both nodes are able to sample during the

same bit time. Figure 4 shows a one-way propagation

delay between two nodes. Extreme propagation delays

(beyond the sample point) will result in invalid arbitra-

tion. This implies that bus lengths are limited at given

CAN data rates.

A CAN system’s propagation delay is calculated as

being a signal’s round trip time on the physical bus

have similar component delays, the propagation delay

is explained mathematically as:

Synchronization

All nodes on a given CAN bus must have the same

NBT. The NRZ bit coding does not encode a clock into

the message. The receivers must synchronize to the

transmitted data stream to insure messages are prop-

erly decoded. There are two methods used for achiev-

ing and maintaining synchronization.

HARD SYNCHRONIZATION

Hard Synchronization only occurs on the first reces-

sive-to-dominant (logic “1” to “0”) edge during a bus idle

condition, which indicates a Start-of-Frame (SOF) con-

dition. Hard synchronization causes the bit timing

counter to be reset to the SyncSeg which causes the

edge to lie within the SyncSeg. At this point, all of the

receivers will be synchronized to the transmitter.

Hard synchronization occurs only once during a mes-

sage. Also, resynchronization may not occur during the

same bit time (SOF) that hard synchronization

occurred.

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