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Trends in today's and future embedded powertrain systems show a strongly growing demand of communication between the functional units inside a car. A cost optimized system partitioning leads to several independent building blocks that have to be interconnected. Depending on the task of each building block, different classes of data exchange can be distinguished, differing in the required bandwidth, the tolerated latency and speed for real time critical tasks. In order to minimize the communication effort concerning time, chip size and overall costs, different communication requirements have been analyzed. The results lead to improvements of standard serial interfaces by application-oriented features.

Recent trends in field bus applications, especially in the automotive section, show a very high demand for data exchange between decentralised, intelligent functional units and modules. These functional units can be grouped together to power train applications or body/convenience applications. In many cases, the coupling of local modules is done with one or more independent bus systems. The actual design and the partitioning of the modules strongly depend on application-specific requirements, such as the total amount of data to be transferred or the maximum of the tolerated latency in data delivery. A very powerful and fast field bus is the CAN bus (Controller Area Network), which supports transfers with data rates up to 1 Mbits/s. Due to the higher transmission speed and the standardized functionality, CAN is a very interesting alternative to and improvement on bus systems based on other protocols.