Comparison between CAN and FIREWIRE

• The CAN bus offers a high-speed communication rate up to 1 M bits / sec, for up to 40 feet, thus facilitating real-time control. The original IEEE 1394 specifications allowed for speeds of 100, 200, and 400Mbps, IEEE 1394b provides speeds of 800, 1600, and 3200Mbps.

• CAN protocol can link up to 2032 devices (assuming one node with one identifier) on a single network. But accounting to the practical limitations of the hardware (transceivers), it may only link up to 110 nodes on a single network.FIREWIRE allows for the connection of up to 63 external devices.

  

• In CAN it is possible to add nodes to the bus without reprogramming the other nodes to recognize the addition or changing the existing hardware i.e. “Hot-plugging” is possible.FIREWIRE supports “Hot swapping” that is the ability to add and remove devices to a computer while the computer is running and have the operating system automatically recognize the change.

• CAN have gained widespread popularity for embedded control in the areas like industrial automation, automotives, mobile machines, medical, military and other harsh environment network applications.IEEE 1394 a very high-speed bus design that is ideal for high-bandwidth applications like multimedia..