LIN Overview

Local Interconnect Network (LIN) is a low-cost serial communications protocol implemented mostly in automotive networks. It is typically used for mechatronic sub-nodes in automobiles (sensors, actuators), but is also well suited for industrial applications.

The following figure shows an example of an automotive communications architecture with a central gateway. Here, LIN controls the damper motors of the air conditioning system. The LIN specification denotes a LIN sub bus as a LIN Cluster:

auto-network.jpg

Key Features

  • Master-Slave medium access control concept
  • Low-cost silicon implementation based on common UART/SCI interface hardware, an equivalent in software or as a pure state machine.
  • Self-synchronization without a quartz or ceramics resonator in the slave nodes
  • Deterministic signal transmission with signal propagation time computable in advance
  • Low cost, single-wire implementation
  • Speed up to 20 kbit/s
  • "Signal" based application interaction
  • Predictable behavior
  • Reconfigurability
  • Transport layer and diagnostic support


There are a variety of LIN node configuration possibilities, however, all nodes contain a LIN Transceiver, a Universal Asynchronous Receiver Transmitter (UART) Module and an Application Controller (MCU) as shown:

network-basic.png


Microchip offers a variety of LIN Transceivers and MCUs with LIN-Enhanced UARTs to enable these common LIN node configurations.

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