The TCAN1046 has several protection features that limit the short circuit current when a CAN bus line is shorted. These include CAN driver current limiting in the dominant and recessive states and TXD dominant state timeout which prevents permanently having the higher short circuit current of a dominant state in case of a system fault. During CAN communication the bus switches between the dominant and recessive states, thus the short circuit current may be viewed as either the current during each bus state or as a DC average current. When selecting termination resistors or a common mode choke for the CAN design the average power rating, I_OS(AVG), should be used. The percentage dominant is limited by the TXD DTO and the CAN protocol which has forced state changes and recessive bits due to bit stuffing, control fields, and interframe space. These ensure there is a minimum amount of recessive time on the bus even if the data field contains a high percentage of dominant bits.

The average short circuit current of the bus depends on the ratio of recessive to dominant bits and their respective short circuit currents. The average short circuit current may be calculated using Equation 2.

Where:

• I_OS(AVG) is the average short circuit current
• % Transmit is the percentage the node is transmitting CAN messages
• % Receive is the percentage the node is receiving CAN messages
• % REC_Bits is the percentage of recessive bits in the transmitted CAN messages
• % DOM_Bits is the percentage of dominant bits in the transmitted CAN messages
• I_{OS(SS)_REC} is the recessive steady state short circuit current
• I_{OS(SS)_DOM} is the dominant steady state short circuit current

This short circuit current and the possible fault cases of the network should be taken into consideration when sizing the power supply used to generate the transceivers V_CC supply.