  Donors in silicon are now demonstrated as one of the leading candidates for
implementing qubits and quantum information processing. Single qubit
operations, measurements and long coherence times are firmly established, but
progress on controlling two qubit interactions has been slower. One reason for
this is that the inter donor exchange coupling has been predicted to oscillate
with separation, making it hard to estimate in device designs. We present a
multivalley effective mass theory of a donor pair in silicon, including both a
central cell potential and the effective mass anisotropy intrinsic in the Si
conduction band. We are able to accurately describe the single donor properties
of valley-orbit coupling and the spatial extent of donor wave functions,
highlighting the importance of fitting measured values of hyperfine coupling
and the orbital energy of the $1s$ levels. Ours is a simple framework that can
be applied flexibly to a range of experimental scenarios, but it is nonetheless
able to provide fast and reliable predictions. We use it to estimate the
exchange coupling between two donor electrons and we find a smoothing of its
expected oscillations, and predict a monotonic dependence on separation if two
donors are spaced precisely along the [100] direction.
