Fast and efficient – the new CAN FD PC interfaces

Fast and efficient – the new 
CAN FD PC interfaces from HMS

Under the IXXAT brand, HMS is bringing a new CAN PC interface 
series for CAN FD to the market, supporting it with an extensive 
suite of drivers and tools.

With the new CAN-IB 500 and the CAN-IB 600, HMS offers two interface cards (passive/active) that support not only CAN but also the new CAN FD standard. Both cards are for the PCI Express standard. They have up to two CAN interfaces, which can be operated in either CAN or CAN FD modes. Galvanic isolation of the channels is optionally available.

The active CAN-IB 600 also has a built-in microcontroller, so it can even be used in applications with increased requirements for data preprocessing such as high-precision timestamps or active filtering of the messages to be sent from and received by the card.

The cards are supported by both the IXXAT Windows driver packages (VCI) and the real-time driver packages (ECI for Linux, RTX, Intime, QNX).
The IXXAT APIs for CANopen and SAE J1939 also support the new interfaces in CAN mode. For the analysis of CAN and CAN FD networks, HMS offers the IXXAT canAnalyser, a powerful Windows tool.


Classical CAN, with its eight bytes of payload data and a maximum transmission rate of 1 MBit/s, is part of a wide variety of applications, not least due to its favorable price and versatility. Applications that require the transmission of larger quantities of data, however, have had to move to other technologies until now, which is of course associated with higher costs.
Now, with its capacity of up to 64 bytes of payload data and a higher bit rate for payload transmission, CAN FD is eliminating the old limitations of CAN, making it attractive also for applications that have never been able to work with CAN.