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, therefore giving a maximum physical stub length as shown in Equation 1.

where

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

Per Equation 1, Table 10-1 lists the maximum cable-stub lengths for the minimum-driver output rise-times of the SN65HVD1x full-duplex family of transceivers for a signal velocity of 78%.