| 摘要 |
<p>One or more bus bridges are used to partition a large I2C bus into smaller bus segments. By programming address bitmaps that are internal to each bridge, the various bus segments can be made to appear as one logical bus. In addition, the bus topology can be designed to maximize the ability to isolate faults within a given segment, thereby improving the ability of technicians to diagnose problems in very large I2C implementations. In one embodiment, the invention is a unidirectional bus bridge which is designed so that two such bridges can be used in parallel (facing in opposite directions) to implement a fully bi-directional bus bridge. In another embodiment, I2C slave addresses are replicated in a single logical I2C bus by addressing a tunnel command to a bridge, which command contains an address and causes the bridge to which it is addressed to forward the contained address.</p> |
