When connecting a node to the bus, the distance between the transceiver inputs and the cable trunk, known as the stub, should be as short as possible. Stubs present a nonterminated piece of bus line which can introduce reflections as the length of the stub increases. As a general guideline, the electrical length, or round-trip delay, of a stub should be less than one-tenth of the rise time of the driver, thus giving a maximum physical stub length as shown in Equation 1.

where:

t_r is the 10/90 rise time of the driver
c is the speed of light (3 × 10⁸ m/s)
v is the signal velocity of the cable or trace as a factor of c

Per Equation 1, the maximum recommended stub length for the minimum driver output rise time of the SN65HVD1176 device for a signal velocity of 78% is 0.05 meters (0.16 feet).