Computer Hardware Terms, Glossary and Dictionary

address bus

Address bus is an internal channel from the CPU to memory across which the addresses of data are transmitted. The number of lines or wires in the address bus determines the amount of memory that can be directly addressed as each line carries one bit of the address. For example, if the address bus contains electrical lines, the processor can address up to 2**n unique locations. No actual data is carried on this bus, rather memory addresses, which control the location that data is either read from or written to, are sent here. The speed of the address bus is the same as the data bus it is matched to.

Related Terms

address bus