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www.philipsmcu.comI2C (Inter-Integrated Circuit) Bus Technical Overview and Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

by Axel Wolf, ESAcademy

based on the I2C FAQ by Vince Himpe

 

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In the early 1980's, Philips Semiconductors developed a simple bi-directional 2-wire bus for efficient inter-IC control. This bus is called the Inter-IC or I2C-bus. At present, Philips’ IC range includes more than 150 CMOS and bipolar I2C-bus compatible types for performing communication functions between intelligent control devices (e.g. microcontrollers), general-purpose circuits (e.g. LCD drivers, remote I/O ports, memories) and application-oriented circuits (e.g. digital tuning and signal processing circuits for radio and video systems).

All I2C-bus compatible devices incorporate an on-chip interface which allows them to communicate directly with each other via the I2C-bus. This design concept solves the many interfacing problems encountered when designing digital control circuits. I2C has become a de facto world standard that is now implemented in over 1000 different ICs and is licensed to more than 50 companies.

 

Contents

General Introduction

Historical Background

I2C Bus Protocol

I2C Bus Hardware

Bus Arbitration

Clock Synchronization

Using the clock synchronizing mechanism as a handshake

Special Addresses and Exceptions

Enhanced I2C (FAST mode)

High-Speed I2C (Hs-mode)

Extended addressing (10-bit)

I2C Bus Events

Start and Stop conditions

Transmitting a byte to a slave device

Receiving a byte from a slave device

Getting Acknowledge from a slave device

Giving Acknowledge to a slave device

No Acknowledge condition

Frequently asked question section

I2C FAQ

Miscellaneous information

Overview about the different versions of the I2C bus specification

I2C driver in Pseudocode

I2C Monitoring and Debugging Tools

Legal notes and Copyrights

ESAcademy, 2000

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