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I2C

I²C
I²C bus logo.svg
Type Bus
Designer Philips Semiconductor, known today as NXP Semiconductors
Designed 1982; 35 years ago (1982)
Data signal Open-Drain
Width data line (SDA) + clock line (SCL)
Bitrate 0.1 / 0.4 / 1.0 / 3.4 / 5.0 Mbit/s
(depending on mode)
Protocol Serial, Half Duplex

I²C (Inter-Integrated Circuit), pronounced I-squared-C, is a multi-master, multi-slave, single-ended, serial computer bus invented by Philips Semiconductor (now NXP Semiconductors). It is typically used for attaching lower-speed peripheral ICs to processors and microcontrollers in short-distance, intra-board communication. Alternatively I²C is spelled I2C (pronounced I-two-C) or IIC (pronounced I-I-C).

Since October 10, 2006, no licensing fees are required to implement the I²C protocol. However, fees are still required to obtain I²C slave addresses allocated by NXP.

Several competitors, such as Siemens AG (later Infineon Technologies AG, now Intel mobile communications), NEC, Texas Instruments, STMicroelectronics (formerly SGS-Thomson), Motorola (later Freescale, now merged with NXP), Nordic Semiconductor and Intersil, have introduced compatible I²C products to the market since the mid-1990s.

SMBus, defined by Intel in 1995, is a subset of I²C, defining a stricter usage. One purpose of SMBus is to promote robustness and interoperability. Accordingly, modern I²C systems incorporate some policies and rules from SMBus, sometimes supporting both I²C and SMBus, requiring only minimal reconfiguration either by commanding or output pin use.

The history of I²C specification releases:

I²C uses only two bidirectional open-drain lines, Serial Data Line (SDA) and Serial Clock Line (SCL), pulled up with resistors. Typical voltages used are +5 V or +3.3 V although systems with other voltages are permitted.

The I²C reference design has a 7-bit or a 10-bit (depending on the device used) address space. Common I²C bus speeds are the 100 kbit/s standard mode and the 10 kbit/s low-speed mode, but arbitrarily low clock frequencies are also allowed. Recent revisions of I²C can host more nodes and run at faster speeds (400 kbit/s Fast mode, 1 Mbit/s Fast mode plus or Fm+, and 3.4 Mbit/s High Speed mode). These speeds are more widely used on embedded systems than on PCs. There are also other features, such as 16-bit addressing.


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