Control bus

In computer architecture, A control bus is (part of) a computer bus, used by CPUs for communicating with other devices within the computer. While the address bus carries the information about the device with which the CPU is communicating and the data bus carries the actual data being processed, the control bus carries commands from the CPU and returns status signals from the devices. For example, if the data is being read or written to the device the appropriate line (read or write) will be active (logic one).

The number and type of lines in a control bus varies but there are basic lines common to all microprocessors, such as:

Additional lines are microprocessor-dependent, such as:

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