(
Inter-
IC bus) A two-line, synchronous, serial bus that is widely used to connect chips together on a circuit board. Also called the "I-squared-C bus" and developed by Philips in the 1980s, it is used as a control bus for every variety of chip from sensors to microprocessors. One chip, typically a microcontroller or DSP, functions as a master and initiates requests, and all other chips are slaves that respond to the master. See
SPI bus and
IPMI.