In this paper, a novel hardware architecture of Controller Area Network (CAN) applications is proposed. Taking advantage of a highly integrated chip, which functions as a CAN controller as well as a CAN transceiver, the proposed architecture reduces the number of necessary external components, supports popular serial buses and thus facilitates application development. The architecture is applied in a CAN to Bluetooth bridge, whose design is described in this article. It is demonstrated that the proposed architecture is stable and practical.