The first RFC broadly outlining the general ideas that would later form the core design principles of Cyphal (branded UAVCAN at the time) was published in early 2014.

[4] It was a response to the perceived lack of adequate technology that could facilitate robust real-time intra-vehicular data exchange between distributed components of modern intelligent vehicles (primarily unmanned aircraft).

Since the original RFC, the protocol has been through three major design iterations, which culminated in the release of the first long-term stable revision in 2020 (6 years later) labelled UAVCAN v1.0.

[12] Cyphal is positioned by its developers as a highly deterministic, safety-oriented alternative to high-level publish-subscribe frameworks such as DDS or the computation graph of ROS, which is sufficiently compact and simple to be usable in deeply embedded high-integrity applications.

The development of the core standard and its reference implementations is conducted in an open manner, coordinated via the public discussion forum.

m. 10 BASE T1S is added to IEEE 802.3 defining half-duplex, two-wire, multi-drop Ethernet media with PLCA (PHY-Level Collision Avoidance).

[20] The protocol offers a stateless publish-subscribe communication model where a node can begin operation immediately upon connection to the network to accommodate high-integrity applications.

[22] DSDL is ideologically similar to the interface description language used in ROS, except that it introduces additional static constraints in order to render the solution suitable for real-time high-integrity embedded systems.

[10][23] The protocol is built around the following core design principles that are intended to ensure that the solution is well-suited for modern complex safety-critical vehicular systems.

The protocol specification provides a set of rules intended to avoid conflicts and enhance interoperability of data types defined by independent vendors.