An integrated circuit 2 is provided with multiple bus masters 4, 6 and multiple bus slaves 8, 10, 12, communicating via a multi-channel communication bus. A separate write data channel, read data channel and write response channel are provided as well as a separate write address channel and a read address channel. The provision of a dedicated write response channel frees the read data channel to be more efficiently used for the transfer of read data. Transactions may be burst mode transactions with a single write response corresponding to the write transaction as a whole.