Controller area network for monitor and control in ALMA

The Controller Area Network (CAN), initially developed for the automotive industry, is becoming increasingly popular in industrial process control applications. The need for distributed low data rate monitor and control networking in industry is similar to the needs of the various instrumentation and support equipment in a modern radio telescope. In particular, immunity to noise and low radio frequency emission characteristics are common to both domains. The Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) project has adopted CAN technology for use in local monitor and control applications at each of its 64 antennas. A standard interface slave node providing flexible I/O options is under development and a simple application-level protocol making use of CAN to access these nodes in a master/slave fashion has been implemented. This paper will present the work which has been completed to date including experiences in the use of CAN in an astronomical environment. In addition, analysis and simulation of CAN networks is compared with the performance of our implementation in the lab.