The Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI) is a synchronous serial communication interface specification used for short-distance communication, primarily in embedded systems. The interface was developed by Motorola in the mid-1980s and has become a de facto standard. Typical applications include Secure Digital cards and liquid crystal displays.

SPI devices communicate in full duplex mode using a master-slave architecture usually with a single master (though some Atmel devices support changing roles on the fly depending on an external (SS) pin). The master (controller) device originates the frame for reading and writing. Multiple slave-devices may be supported through selection with individual chip select (CS), sometimes called slave select (SS) lines.

Sometimes SPI is called a four-wire serial bus, contrasting with three-, two-, and one-wire serial buses. The SPI may be accurately described as a synchronous serial interface, but it is different from the Synchronous Serial Interface (SSI) protocol, which is also a four-wire synchronous serial communication protocol. The SSI protocol employs differential signaling and provides only a single simplex communication channel. For any given transaction SPI is one master and multi slave communication.