I was in a similar situation not too long ago. The part only offered bit-level I2C which means it wasn't a matter of just writing a byte to the I2C buffer and forgetting it--I still had to clock out the bits one bit at a time. The code (available from Philips in an app note) was huge.

I had some problems that turned out to be hardware, but in the course of trying to resolve the problem I switched to a software approach and based my work on some I2C routines available on Peter's site. Once the hardware was working the code worked like a charm and was MUCH shorter than the Philips app note sample code.

I never went back to the hardware-based approach. I'd probably consider it on those derivatives that support byte-level I2C where you can write out a byte at a time (like the UART). But when you have to clock out a bit at a time it just doesn't seem worth it.

Regards,
Craig Steiner