This document provides an overview of the I2C protocol. It describes that I2C was designed by Philips in the 1980s to allow communication between components on the same circuit board. It has since been migrated to NXP and expanded to support higher bus speeds and lower voltages. The document outlines the I2C architecture as a half-duplex, synchronous, multi-master bus using a serial data line and serial clock. It defines I2C nodes can function as a master or slave and transmit or receive data. Electrical characteristics, start/stop conditions, packet formats, clock stretching, arbitration and multi-byte transactions are also summarized.
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