The IS24C256 maintains compatibility with the popular 2-wire bus protocol, so it is easy to design into applications implementing this bus type. The simple bus consists of the Serial Clock wire (SCL) and the Serial Data wire (SDA). Using the bus, a Master device such as a microcontroller is usually connected to one or more Slave devices such as the IS24C256. The bit stream over the SDA line includes a series of bytes, which identifies a particular Slave device, an instruction, an address within that Slave device, and a series of data, if appropriate. The IS24C256 has a Write Protect pin (WP) to allow blocking of any write instruction transmitted over the bus.