Control bus

The control bus is a bus that carries control signals between the processor and the other components of the computer, in order to control which components are active at what times, and to tell the components which one should be listening to the data.

It basically tells the different components of the computer what to do and when to do it, so that they can work together to run the program.

What does the control bus transfer?

• Signals to control the flow of data between the processor and memory, like signals to indicate when the processor is reading from or writing to memory (called ‘read’ and ‘write’ signals).
• Signals to control the flow of data between the processor and other components, like signals to indicate when the processor is sending data to or receiving data from other components (called ‘input’ and ‘output’ signals).
• Signals to control the flow of data between different components, like signals to indicate when one component is sending data to another component, so the receiving component knows to listen for the data (called ‘enable’ signals).