I started this several posts ago and didn't get it posted yet because I've been trying to find the rule of thumb again--and I've been unable to--for how many inches per ns of rise time you can go before worrying about terminations. If you're at 4MHz and under, you can stay with HC speeds which I think will be fine for your 6" lines without terminations. In the automated test equipment shown on my project pages
here, the actual STD bus backplane was about 5" long, and the boards gave a few extra inches to the signal path, and it used LS and HC logic with no terminations and no problems.
If you
do terminate though, what resistance to use to properly terminate a line depends on the transmission-line characteristic impedance, which depends on the width of the line and its distance from the ground plane (.060"? .020"? Something else?), and also the dielectric constant (which for standard FR4 PCBs is 4.2). You'll want the lines narrow enough to get the characteristic impedance high enough that the logic family being used can reliably drive valid logic levels to the load. If the load is a little off, it's better, according to Dr. Howard Johnson, and it makes sense, to have them a little high than a little low.
https://web.archive.org/web/20120302190 ... ws/5_1.htmFor CMOS logic where the middle of the "no man's land" for logic levels is 2.5V and it pulls up and down with the same strength (unlike TTL), it would be appropriate to have matched resistors to Vcc and ground, ie, to take the termination to Vcc/2.
https://web.archive.org/web/20120302190 ... itTerm.htm and
https://web.archive.org/web/20120302190 ... dition.htmIf you have loads along the length of the line though instead of having a "non-stop flight" so to speak, you have a more complex situation; also, when signals intentionally go in both directions, like for memory where you are reading and not just writing. You pretty much need terminations at both ends.
https://web.archive.org/web/20120302190 ... dsterm.htm .
Actual ground bounce is a problem with ground connections though, not terminations. It is widely misunderstood. See my page on construction for good AC performance at
http://wilsonminesco.com/6502primer/construction.html , particularly the links at the bottom, one being to a Fairchild ap. note on groundbounce.