Hi Tracy,
The steps you've described is not entirely clear to me. Are you trying to decode/understand someone-else's code?
Could you please clarify what do you mean by write a byte 0xAA?
The SMBus standard defines the write byte protocol as shown in figure 41 of the datasheet, it needs a register address followed by a data byte. Is 0xAA the register address? if so what's the data byte?
I understand the 3rd step is a block read operation. It is usually used to read back a block of data from the device. Before block read operation, user needs to setup the start address for the block read, by either a SEND BYTE operation (to block read RAMs) or a WRITE BYTE operation (to block read EEPROM) as shown in figure 42 of the datasheet.
so maybe step 1 and 2 are used to setup the address for the block read operation?
If you could describe the operations in more detail maybe i can help explain them.
Ren