Industry Expert Blogs

Device driver software is an essential part of any system-on-chip offering. But who develops and verifies this software, and what tools and methodologies do they use? This is an increasingly vexing question for many design teams - but it's absolutely critical as the industry moves towards application-driven design.

Why are drivers so important? Because they provide the link between a software application and the hardware it runs on, allowing the OS and the application to manage hardware resources. Application developers today don't want to have to know about special features in the hardware. They rely on a hardware abstraction layer that includes drivers to abstract those details away. If the drivers don't present hardware features accurately to the OS and the applications, the applications can't use those features, and all the hard work that goes into differentiating hardware goes nowhere.

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