Whenever a standard gains traction it quickly gets polluted with sub-standards, updates, forks, extensions, and what not. The hard part—besides trying to stay up-to-date with it—is to keep all the emerging flavors compatible. The Controller Area Network, better known as CAN, is a victim of this phenomenon too.

The latest addition to the family—introduced some five years ago—is CAN Flexible Data-Rate (CAN FD) that offers many benefits over traditional CAN 2.0 including faster data rates and data byte message expansion.

Because microcontrollers supporting CAN FD are still quite rare, Microchip has decided to create a stand-alone CAN FD controller, the MCP2517FD, similar to their popular MCP2515 stand-alone CAN controller. The new controller, not pin-compatible with the MCP2515 and not requiring any other external components, allows the easy addition of CAN FD support to existing designs.

The MCP2517FD-H/SL is available in a 14-lead SOIC package; the JHA version is housed in a 14-lead VQFN package with wettable flanks.

Illustration: Microchip