PCA9515A All information provided in this document is subject to legal disclaimers. © NXP B.V. 2012. All rights reserved.
Product data sheet Rev. 5 — 23 March 2012 4 of 20
NXP Semiconductors
PCA9515A
I
2
C-bus repeater
6. Functional description
Refer to Figure 1 “Functional diagram of PCA9515A”.
The PCA9515A integrated circuit contains two identical buffer circuits which enable
I
2
C-bus and similar bus systems to be extended without degradation of system
performance.
The PCA9515A contains two bidirectional, open-drain buffers specifically designed to
support the standard LOW-level contention arbitration of the I
2
C-bus. Except during
arbitration or clock stretching, the PCA9515A acts like a pair of non-inverting, open-drain
buffers, one for SDA and one for SCL.
6.1 Enable
The EN pin is active HIGH with an internal pull-up and allows the user to select when the
repeater is active. This can be used to isolate a badly behaved slave on power-up until
after the system power-up reset. It should never change state during an I
2
C-bus operation
because disabling during a bus operation will hang the bus and enabling part way through
a bus cycle could confuse the I
2
C-bus parts being enabled.
The enable pin should only change state when the global bus and the repeater port are in
an idle state to prevent system failures.
6.2 I
2
C-bus systems
As with the standard I
2
C-bus system, pull-up resistors are required to provide the logic
HIGH levels on the buffered bus (standard open-collector configuration of the I
2
C-bus).
The size of these pull-up resistors depends on the system, but each side of the repeater
must have a pull-up resistor. This part designed to work with Standard-mode and
Fast-mode I
2
C-bus devices in addition to SMBus devices. Standard-mode I
2
C-bus
devices only specify 3 mA output drive; this limits the termination current to 3 mA in a
generic I
2
C-bus system where Standard-mode devices and multiple masters are possible.
Under certain conditions higher termination currents can be used.
Please see Application Note AN255, I
2
C/SMBus Repeaters, Hubs and Expanders for
additional information on sizing resistors and precautions when using more than one
PCA9515A/PCA9516A in a system or using the PCA9515A/PCA9516A in conjunction
with the P82B96.