I2C (slave mode) behavior at beginning of transfer

[HWidj.2]

I'm configuring I2C4 as a slave receiver, using interrupt method. I noticed that when the I2C master (another MCU) sends the slave address, I2C4 detects an address match and sets the ADDR flag in the I2C4->ISR register. What baffles me is that at this point I2C4 holds the SCK line low and communication will not proceed. The only way I can avoid this 'stuck' situation is to enable the ADDRIE interrupt which will fire on an address match and I manually clear the ADDR flag.

I'm familiar with I2C protocol, but this is my first experience with STM32 I2C peripheral, and I thought it's strange that an address match event must be explicitly acknowledged (by clearing a flag) by software. Is this the normal behavior of I2C slave in STM32H7? I'm using the STM32H723ZG Nucleo board.

Below is my initialization code (for brevity I omitted the clock and pin configuration from the listing, they checked out all right).

 // Disable I2C4.
 I2C4->CR1 &= ~I2C_CR1_PE; 
 while(I2C4->CR1 & I2C_CR1_PE) {}
 
 // Enable receive complete interrupt.
 I2C4->CR1 |= I2C_CR1_RXIE; 
 
 // Set own address.
 I2C4->OAR1 |= (LL_I2C_OWNADDRESS1_7BIT | (MY_ADDRESS << I2C_OAR1_OA1_Pos)); 
 
 // Enable Own address 1.
 2C4->OAR1 |= I2C_OAR1_OA1EN;
 
 // Set timing register.
 I2C4->TIMINGR = 0x00601956;
 
 // Enable I2C4
 I2C4->CR1 |= I2C_CR1_PE; 

Here's the register contents when address match event occurs.

[TDK]

That's how it works with NOSTRETCH=0 (default). You can set NOSTRETCH=1 if you want, but the real solution would be to clear the flag and send data on TXDR or read from RXDR. See "I2C Slave Mode" in the reference manual.