Applications of the PCA9544A contain an I²C (or SMBus) master device and up to four I²C slave devices. The downstream channels are ideally used to resolve I²C slave address conflicts. For example, if four identical digital temperature sensors are needed in the application, one sensor can be connected at each channel: 0, 1, 2, and 3. When the temperature at a specific location needs to be read, the appropriate channel can be enabled and all other channels switched off, the data can be retrieved, and the I²C master can move on and read the next channel.

In an application where the I²C bus contains many additional slave devices that do not result in I²C slave address conflicts, these slave devices can be connected to any desired channel to distribute the total bus capacitance across multiple channels.