When connecting a node to the bus, the distance between the transceiver inputs and the cable trunk, known as the stub, must be as short as possible. Stubs present a nonterminated piece of bus line that can introduce reflections as the length of the stub increases. As a general guideline, the electrical length, or round-trip delay, of a stub must 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