NEC Corp and Robert Bosch GmbH of Germany have signed an agreement giving NEC worldwide rights to design, develop and market large-scale integrated circuits that conform with Bosch’s CAN Controller Area Network specification: the agreement provides the promise of executing a cheaper and more precise means of control in automotive subsystems for brake controls, suspension and engine management; the complexity of cable harnesses has grown significantly but use of the CAN protocol enables the elimination of thick cable harnesses and the possibility in future of implementing the CAN protocol on even smaller 78000 series microcontollers in single-chip or multi-chip implementations; Bosch’s Controller Network provides a serial communications protocol with a data rate of up to 1Mbps.
