three shared signal lines, for bit timing, data, and R/W. The selection of communicating partners is made with one separate wire for each chip. As the number of chips grows, so do the selection wires. The next stage is to use multiplexing of the selection wires and call them an address bus.
If there are 8 address wires we can select any one of 256 devices by using a ‘one of 256’ decoder IC. In a parallel bus system there could be 8 or 16 (or more) data wires. Taken to the next step, we can share the function of the wires between addresses and data but it starts to take quite a bit of hardware and worst is, we still have lots of wires. We can take a different approach and try to eliminate all except the data wiring itself. Then we need to multiplex the data, the selection (address), and the direction info - read/write. We need to develop relatively complex rules for that, but we save on those wires. This presentation covers buses that use only one or two data lines so that they are still attractive for sending data over reasonable distances - at least a few meters, but perhaps even km.