When looking on the DigiKey website for CAN transcievers, I noticed that some are marked as “Half Duplex” and some are marked as “Full Duplex”. I was puzzled, since my understanding is that CAN is a half-duplex protocol (each device can only transmit or receive, but not both simultaneously), and many of the “Full Duplex” devices show that they have only a single CANH/CANL pin pair. When looking at the datasheets of some of the devices labelled as “full duplex”, I was unable to find any mention of simultaneous transmit and receive capability. Is it possible that some of these devices might be mis-labelled?
See duplex column:
