17.2.2 Functional Description

The I²C provides a simple two-wire bidirectional bus consisting of a wired-AND type serial clock line (SCL) and a wired-AND type serial data line (SDA).

The I²C bus provides a simple, but efficient method of interconnecting multiple master and slave devices. An arbitration mechanism is provided for resolving bus ownership between masters, as only one master device may own the bus at any given time. The arbitration mechanism relies on the wired-AND connections to avoid bus drivers short-circuiting.

A unique address is assigned to all slave devices connected to the bus. A device can contain both master and slave logic, and can emulate multiple slave devices by responding to more than one address.