


Most 1-wire devices have three terminals. The standard 1-wire bus has a minimum of two wires: a data line and the ground return. This means the slave devices must sync with the master for the read and write operations. The protocol uses no clock signal and data is communicated in fixed timeslots. Serial communication is fully controlled and managed by the master device. There can be only one master device on a 1-wire standard bus, with up to 100 slave devices. This protocol is a low-speed, half-duplex, bidirectional, low-power master-slave data communication standard used by several devices, including temperature sensors, real-time clocks, EEPROMs, identification (intellectual property protection) devices, timers, and iButtons.

The 1-Wire protocol is a proprietary standard for serial data communication from Maxim Integrated.
