A Controller Area Network (CAN) is a serial communication system based on the CAN protocol that enables efficient distributed real-time control combined with a very high level of security. The CAN protocol is especially suited for structuring "intelligent" device networks, as well as for building automatic control environments that contain sensors and actuators within a system or sub-system. In a CAN network, there is no addressing of subscribers or stations in the conventional sense, but instead prioritized messages are transmitted.

The PISO-CM200U is a very powerful and economic solution for an active CAN board, containing two CAN channels that cover a wide range of CAN applications. The 32-bit on-board microcontroller allows the filtering, pre-processing, and storage of CAN messages (with a timestamp), as well as real-time transmission of CAN messages, among many other features.

An added benefit is that custom CAN Bus applications can be developed using the PISO-CM200U library. When the PISO-CM200U is active, data exchange between the custom application and the CAN Bus firmware is performed via the memory mapping method on the PISO-CM200U.