The Foundation of Device Driver Development for Windows Embedded Compact

Abstract

Any discussion about device drivers should provide some perspective of what device drivers are and why we need them. Practically, a device driver is an executable piece of software dedicated to access a specific peripheral hardware device in order to control it and to perform input/output (I/O) operations. Figuratively, you can think of a device driver as a negotiator between the operating system software and the hardware it uses. To understand this analogy we need to look at how multitasking operating systems, such as Windows Embedded Compact, handle peripheral hardware devices to provide a unified generic access method for their higher-level applications and processes.