It integrates one driver and one receiver on a single 5V rail (4.5V to 5.5V) and pushes data at 25 Mbps — fast enough for high-speed industrial backplanes, motor-drive comms, or building-automation field buses. The 130 mV of receiver hysteresis cleans up noisy lines without external filtering.
25 Mbps — is it overkill for your link?
At 25 Mbps the SN65HVD23DR can clock a 400-meter run at lower baud rates or a short stub at full speed. For typical fieldbus applications (115.2 kbps to 1 Mbps) it has plenty of margin, so you are not pushing the driver into slew-rate limiting. If your bus is strictly 250 kbps or below, a slower slew-limited transceiver like the SN65HVD3082E might reduce EMI and reflections, but the 23DR's faster edges are fine with proper termination and stub lengths under 6 inches.
For BOM resilience, the SOIC-8 footprint is shared across the SN65HVD2x family, so a pin-compatible swap (e.g., SN65HVD22 for full-duplex or SN65HVD24 for a different speed grade) is possible without a board spin.