Texas Instruments has introduced the TCAN6062, which the company describes as the industry's first commercially available CAN XL transceiver, designed to help industrial systems keep up with rapidly growing data demands. CAN, or Controller Area Network, is a communication protocol widely used in industrial and automotive systems, and CAN XL is an extended version supporting much larger data payloads. The TCAN6062 supports payloads up to 2,048 bytes per message frame and data rates as high as 20 Mbps, while still ensuring priority messages get delivered first and on time, a capability that matters for systems like humanoid robots, industrial robots, and human-machine interface (HMI) systems that depend on precise timing.
The transceiver is backward compatible with CAN flexible data rate (FD) and CAN signal improvement capability (SIC), letting engineering teams migrate existing designs to CAN XL gradually rather than needing a complete redesign. It also lets engineers consolidate different communication layers, allowing Ethernet traffic to run over the same network using TCP/IP tunneling, meaning diagnostics, sensor data, control traffic, and over-the-air updates can all be transmitted efficiently over a single unified network instead of separate ones.
The push behind this comes from how industrial systems are generating and requiring more data than ever, particularly for applications that need fast, precisely timed communication to coordinate motion control, sensor feedback, and diagnostic data. These growing requirements have often forced engineers to accept compromises elsewhere in their system design to work around limited bandwidth. TI positions the TCAN6062 as closing that gap, giving engineers a path to higher-bandwidth networking while preserving the reliability CAN has traditionally been known for.
Although the CAN XL specification has been standardized for several years, TI says it's the first company to bring actual hardware supporting it to the mass market, turning what had been a defined protocol into something engineers can readily implement in new designs.
Dwight Byrd, general manager of interface products at TI, said that as industrial systems become more intelligent and interconnected, the demands placed on their networks keep evolving, with engineers needing more data, higher speeds, and greater flexibility without sacrificing performance or reliability. He said the TCAN6062 puts that capability directly in engineers' hands, helping them build faster, more capable industrial systems.
On specifications, the transceiver's signal improvement capability helps reduce ringing, meaning unwanted electrical oscillation on the signal, by as much as 80% in complex networks, which simplifies the validation process in systems with many connected nodes. Combined with wide input/output voltage compatibility and protection up to ±58V, the chip offers considerable design flexibility across a range of industrial use cases.
TI's engineers were also involved in developing the ISO 11898-2:2024 standard underlying CAN XL, as members of the CAN in Automation (CiA) technical group responsible for the protocol's physical layer specification. Holger Zeltwanger, managing director at CiA, said CAN has served as the backbone of industrial communications for decades, and that TI's long-standing membership and collaboration with CiA helped shape CAN XL as a standard meant to guide the broader industry. He said the introduction of the first commercially available CAN SIC XL transceiver now makes CAN XL accessible to engineers worldwide.
Arthur Mutter, chairman of the CAN XL Special Interest Group at CiA and a senior networking technologies executive at Bosch, described CAN XL as opening the door to a new class of applications by delivering higher performance at a reasonable cost, characterizing it as a better and cheaper version of CAN FD that can also tunnel Ethernet traffic. He said that with TI now offering a CAN SIC XL transceiver, system designers can use CAN XL to exchange data quickly, up to 20 Mbit/s, and reliably across a wide range of applications, from industrial and robotics systems to automotive safety systems.
The TCAN6062 extends TI's existing CAN transceiver lineup, which already spans CAN FD and CAN SIC, giving engineers a broader range of options for moving more data faster, farther, and more reliably.
