PCA9517_3 © NXP B.V. 2007. All rights reserved.
Product data sheet Rev. 03 — 30 January 2007 5 of 19
NXP Semiconductors
PCA9517
Level translating I
2
C-bus repeater
7. Application design-in information
A typical application is shown in Figure 4. In this example, the system master is running
on a 3.3 V I
2
C-bus while the slave is connected to a 1.2 V bus. Both buses run at 400 kHz.
Master devices can be placed on either bus.
The PCA9517 is 5 V tolerant, so it does not require any additional circuitry to translate
between 0.9 V to 5.5 V bus voltages and 2.7 V to 5.5 V bus voltages.
When the A-side of the PCA9517 is pulled LOW by a driver on the I
2
C-bus, a comparator
detects the falling edge when it goes below 0.3V
CCA
and causes the internal driver on the
B-side to turn on, causing the B-side to pull down to about 0.5 V. When the B-side of the
PCA9517 falls, first a CMOS hysteresis type input detects the falling edge and causes the
internal driver on the A-side to turn on and pull the A-side pin down to ground. In order to
illustrate what would be seen in a typical application, refer to Figure 8 and Figure 9. If the
bus master in Figure 4 were to write to the slave through the PCA9517, waveforms shown
in Figure 8 would be observed on the A bus. This looks like a normal I
2
C-bus transmission
except that the HIGH level may be as low as 0.9 V, and the turn on and turn off of the
acknowledge signals are slightly delayed.
On the B bus side of the PCA9517, the clock and data lines would have a positive offset
from ground equal to the V
OL
of the PCA9517. After the 8th clock pulse, the data line will
be pulled to the V
OL
of the slave device which is very close to ground in this example. At
the end of the acknowledge, the level rises only to the LOW level set by the driver in the
PCA9517 for a short delay while the A bus side rises above 0.3V
CCA
then it continues
HIGH. It is important to note that any arbitration or clock stretching events require that the
LOW level on the B bus side at the input of the PCA9517 (V
IL
) be at or below 0.4 V to be
recognized by the PCA9517 and then transmitted to the A bus side.
Multiple PCA9517 A-sides can be connected in a star configuration (Figure 5), allowing all
nodes to communicate with each other.
Multiple PCA9517s can be connected in series (Figure 6) as long as the A-side is
connected to the B-side. I
2
C-bus slave devices can be connected to any of the bus
segments. The number of devices that can be connected in series is limited by repeater
delay/time-of-flight considerations on the maximum bus speed requirements.
Fig 4. Typical application
002aac201
V
CCA
V
CCB
PCA9517
SDAB SDAA
SCLB SCLA
EN
10 kΩ
10 kΩ
SDA
SCL
BUS
MASTER
400 kHz
SLAVE
400 kHz
SDA
SCL
bus B bus A
1.2 V
3.3 V
10 kΩ
10 kΩ
