Contactless Interconnect Circuit Design for Automotive CAN Communication

This paper proposes a circuit design method for contactless interconnects using capacitive coupling. The capacitive coupling with air as a dielectric can provide a contactless interconnect applicable to vehicular communication environments. The coupler which composed with parallel plates is analyzed and modelled with equivalent circuits. The capacitive coupler has the characteristics of a high pass filter which blocks the low frequency range of digital signal and thus additional recovery circuits are needed. The half-duplex communication circuit using OOK modulation is proposed to overcome such limitations. The designed circuit is applied to practical automotive CAN communication environments and the feasibility of the proposed design is verified through circuit simulation.