TCA4311A: Communication between one master and multiple slaves

Hi Y.Ottey,

The purpose of fig.12 is to show how the TCA4311A can be used to isolate the capacitances of IO cards from the backplane. In a normal I2C scenario where all the cards are directly plugged into the backplane all the capacitances of the cards would add together. This would greatly increase the Bus capacitance and the rise and fall times of the Bus would suffer greatly.

In this setup the TCA4311A is isolating capacitance of the backplane from the capacitance of the IO cards. The backplane only has to drive the capacitance of the TCA4311A which is 10 pf, and the TCA4311A only has to drive the capacitance of one IO card.

Y.Ottey said:

1. In this example, TCA4311A is placed on the slave side (I / O Peripheral Card side), but is TCA4311A used on the master side (Backplane side)?

In this example there is no TCA4311A on the Commander (formally Master) side because it is not needed for this application.

Y.Ottey said:

2. If TCA4311A is not used on the master side of Fig. 12, the buffer is placed only on the slave side. At this time, is there a merit of arranging the TCA4311A only on the slave side as shown in Fig.12.

Let me know if you understand the merit of this setup after my explanation. If not let me know if you have any further questions.

Best,

Chris