When it comes to driving LEDs, a serial bus connection eliminates the need for many connections to the MCU. The SPI–Serial Peripheral Interface was introduced in the ’80s by Motorola and been around for many years. It is still very popular, and the purpose of this note is to show how to use a two standard new open drain shift register to interface an MCU. ON Semiconductor is introducing a new shift register especially aimed at driving the newly available tri–color LEDs (red, green, blue). The NLSF595 may be used as an SPI peripheral, or with standard I/O.