GPIO is an acronym for General Purpose Input/Output and is used in embedded electronics field. GPIO devices provided a set of IO ports which can be configured for either input or output. In addition GPIO chips may support the common bus protocols like I²C, SPI and SMBus serial buses. In this case the GPIO chips turn out to be a cheaper solution than using a microcontroller for this purpose. I2C (for Inter-Integrated Circuit, pronounced I-squared-C) is a serial computer bus invented by Philips. ... The Serial Peripheral Interface Bus or SPI bus is a very loose standard for controlling almost any digital electronics that accepts a clocked serial stream of bits. ... The System Management Bus (abbreviated to SMBus or SMB) is a simple two-wire bus used for communication with low-bandwidth devices on a motherboard, especially power related chips such as a laptops rechargeable battery subsystem (see Smart Battery Data). ...

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