Device Drivers

Driver development is a major task which entails detailed knowledge of the communication controller and close cooperation with board and chip vendors. Advanced Relay's LayGO® Multiprotocol Toolkit supports a wide range of synchronous communications hardware, from single line PCMCIA and PC104 cards to standard 8 line PCI cards. Our highly modular software design makes it possible for us to easily support new communications cards as they become available.

If your project requires specialized hardware not currently supported by LayGO®, Advanced Relay can write a custom driver or adapt LayGO® to use a driver available from another source.

Customers sometimes require drivers with particular features that were previously implemented in specialized hardware which is no longer available. The hardware functions can now be implemented in software. These drivers may use byte synchronous protocols such as Bisync or Monosync instead of the bit synchronous protocol used by HDLC. They sometimes use hardware signals, such as DTR and RTS, as part of the protocol. Advanced Relay has extensive experience customizing drivers to meet customer requirements.

Once a driver is completed on our development platform, we provide wrappers for operating systems, such as Windows NT/2000/XP, Linux and Solaris. If the driver has to be ported to another operating system, we will obtain the Driver Development Kit (DDK) for that OS and develop a new wrapper. The effort required depends largely on the driver model of the target OS.