apHarmony offers driver development services for custom hardware and embedded applications. With our team of experienced computer engineers, we will be happy to help make your driver development project a success. Please give us a call at 630-855-7522 for a free evaluation and quote.

There are two general forms of driver development – creating custom hardware interfaces for a particular software application, or creating a general-purpose drivers for the Windows or Linux operating systems. The more specific the project the easier it is to develop, so creating a custom hardware interface is often less work than creating a general-purpose driver for public distribution.

When developing a software driver, it's often important to work closely with the firmware team, not just to define hardware function, but also to work together to simplify development across the thin line between hardware and software. Depending on the performance needs vs development complexity, the decision to keep certain code on the firmware or software-level will depend on each particular application. High-performance systems that need real-time response to hardware events may need to keep key timing elements on the firmware in order to meet performance requirements. Similarly, complex data processing may be easier to be handled on the software side, especially if the code may be updated. Firmware updates are much harder for users to execute than their software counterparts.

Another key aspect of driver development is the final user base. Cross-platform drivers should generally have a core set of functions that are shared between all architectures, and then operating-system specific implementations for lower-level functionality. For certain target platforms such as Linux, it may be necessary to provide driver source files for compilation to the required kernel version and system configuration. Thus licensing strategy should be discussed early-on in the development process.

For a free quote on a driver development project, please feel free to give us a call at 630-855-7522.