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The controller area network (CAN) is a real-time fieldbus network which today is very popular in industrial environments because of its very appealing characteristics and low implementation costs. It has, however, serious limitations regarding the network extension and the transmission speed which may rule out this protocol in the next few years, at least for the use in high-performance automation systems. This paper presents a modification to the conventional CAN protocol based on a dual channel topology, which overcomes those limitations and exhibits a behavior that is very similar to the original standard protocol. FastCAN features very high communication performance and ensures a certain degree of compatibility with the existing devices and applications developed for the conventional CAN networks.