Serial communication

SPI? I2C? other?

It will prevent any other devices on the bus from operating but most line drivers are protected from short circuit overloads so it is unlikely that a failed device will cause other drivers to fail.

I've used this part, LTC2803 in some of my designs.

https://www.analog.com/en/products/ltc2803.html

From the datasheet:

"These parts are compatible with the TIA/EIA-232-F standard.
Driver outputs are protected from overload and can
be shorted to ground or up to ±15V without damage."

Any idea of what driver chip is used to connect to the bus?

RS-232 or RS-422 point-to-point or a multi-drop RS-485? Two wire or four wire RS-485? Most 485 buses are two wire.

"Any idea of what driver chip is used to connect to the bus?"

I think Brave Sir Robin was asking about the driver named Chip, not the actual bus.

The driver's name was Chip. I forgot to capitalize it.

Nice cereal bus. Most likely used by a cereal killer. If this bus blocks the freeway, other buses will be damaged if they run into it.

Any low-impedance (short circuit) loading of a communication line will cause communication to fail. But to reduce transmission line reflections the transmitter and receiver circuitry have dampening resistances in the serial circuitry. Thus a semiconductor failure at either the transmitter or receiver will not damage the other. Communication will still likely fail but no additional smoke will be released.

I have a pair of testers that communicate with 8 RS-485 probes. The original setup used one USB to RS-485 converter that sent commands and received replies in series to individually addressed probes. If one of the probes had the Rx and Tx lines wired wrong, the whole group would not communicate. I've since updated the setup to have 8 RS-485 communication modules operating in parallel, which speeds up testing and a mis-wired probe will not stop communications with the other probes.

Several have asked: what sort of serial comms.?

It would be very unusual for a faulty receiver to short out a bus, but, lots of problems (**) can cause a slave to bring down a bus by transmitting when it shouldn't.

** Problems can be hard or soft (eg, addressing problem) or timing or noise causing false polls.