The power consumption of interconnects starts to have a significant impact on a system's total power consumption. Besides increasing buses (length, width) etc. this is mostly due to deep sub-micron effects where coupling capacitances between bus lines (wire-to-wire) are in the same order of magnitude as the base capacitances (wire-to-metal-layer). At that point, encoding schemes that solely address the minimization of transitions for the purpose of power reduction do not effectively work any more. Using a physical bus model that accurately models coupling capacitances, a signal bus encoding/decoding apparatus with encoding schemes that are partially adaptive and that take coupling effects into consideration is presented. The encoding schemes do not assume any a priori knowledge that is particular to a specific application.