The interconnect in a multidrop system differs considerably from a point-to-point system. While point-to-point interconnects are straightforward, and well understood, the bus type architecture encountered with multidrop systems requires more careful attention. We will use Figure 9-5 above to explore these details.

The most basic multidrop system would include a single driver, located at a bus origin, with multiple receiver nodes branching off the main line, and a final receiver at the end of the transmission line, co-located with a bus termination resistor. While this would be the most basic multidrop system, it has several considerations not yet explored.

The location of the transmitter at one bus end allows the design concerns to be simplified, but this comes at the cost of flexibility. With a transmitter located at the origin, a single bus termination at the far-end is required. The far-end termination absorbs the incident traveling wave. The flexibility lost with this arrangement is thus: if the single transmitter needed to be relocated on the bus, at any location other than the origin, we would be faced with a bus with one open-circuited end, and one properly terminated end. Locating the transmitter say in the middle of the bus may be desired to reduce (by ½) the maximum flight time from the transmitter to receiver.

Another new feature in Figure 9-5 is clear in that every node branching off the main line results in stubs. The stubs should be minimized in any case, but have the unintended effect of locally changing the loaded impedance of the bus.

To a good approximation, the characteristic transmission line impedance seen into any cut point in the unloaded multipoint or multidrop bus is defined by √ L/C, where L is the inductance per unit length and C is the capacitance per unit length. As capacitance is added to the bus in the form of devices and interconnections, the bus characteristic impedance is lowered. This may result in signal reflections from the impedance mismatch between the unloaded and loaded segments of the bus.

If the number of loads is constant and can be distributed evenly along the line, reflections can be reduced by changing the bus termination resistors to match the loaded characteristic impedance. Normally, the number of loads are not constant or distributed evenly and the reflections resulting from any mismatching must be accounted for in the noise budget.