Bus Comparisons

25 January 2019 6:25 AM

Comparing CAN bus to ARINC 429:

Cable
CAN: STP or UPT, possible to implement on fiberoptic cable
ARINC 429: STP
Speed
CAN: 1 Mbit/s (high speed) / 125 Kbit/s (low speed)
ARINC 429 100Kbit/s (high speed) / 10-14 Kbit/s (low speed)
Directionality
CAN: bi-directional, connected units can send and receive on the same cable.
ARINC 429: uni-directional, a unit either transmits or receives from a cable.
Number of units on a single bus
CAN: unlimited, although in practice no more than about 32 units will be sharing a bus to avoid data
collisions.
ARINC 429: one transmitter can serve at most 20 receiving units on a single cable.
Since ARINC 429 has only a single transmitter, timely data arrival is guaranteed, while CAN has to
incorporate transmission collision detection & correction which incurs non deterministic time overhead.

On the other hand, ARINC 429 only uses a parity bit for bit level error detection whilst CAN allows for
various methods including CRC checks

Protocols Page 1