The TCA9511A is a hot-swappable I²C bus buffer that supports I/O card insertion into a live backplane without corruption of the data and clock buses. Control circuitry prevents the backplane from being connected to the card until a stop command or bus idle condition occurs on the backplane without bus contention on the card. When the connection is made, this device provides bidirectional buffering, keeping the backplane and card capacitances isolated. During insertion, the SDA and SCL lines are pre-charged to 1 V to minimize the current required to charge the parasitic capacitance of the device.

When the I²C bus is idle, the TCA9511A is put into shutdown mode by setting the EN pin low. When EN is high, the TCA9511A resumes normal operation. It also includes an open drain READY output pin, which indicates that the backplane and card sides are connected together. When READY is high, the SDAIN and SCLIN are connected to SDAOUT and SCLOUT. When the two sides are disconnected, READY is low.