CAN disturbances generator development

Controller Area Network (CAN) is widely used in automotive, especially in safety-related situation. The reliability and stability of CAN-based ECUs and the whole network have become major concern. Thus it is important to research the dynamic behavior of them after the errors take place. A special instrument with windows software called disturbance generator, which can configured to work in different trigger modes and disturbances modes to inject or simulate different physical failures and protocol defined errors to the CAN bus, is developed to meet the specific test requirements. The systems analysis, principle diagram and functional features of the CAN disturbances generator are described, and the hardware and software design of the disturbance generator are presented in detail as well. The test results showed in the paper demonstrate that the CAN disturbances generator is effective and reliable.