Should we study circuitry?

Hi

Should WinCE BSP or driver engineer study circuitry for driver development ,
or it is
hardware engineer work only ?

Thank you.

Chris
Sun Apr 13 07:39:06 PDT 2008

If you want to write BSPs and drivers, you really need to be able to read
schematics. You don't necessarily have to be able to design complex
circuits, but if you can't read a schematic and know where things are hooked
up, trying to write a driver without a hardware engineer holding your hand
will be tough.


--

Chris Tacke, Embedded MVP
OpenNETCF Consulting
Giving back to the embedded community
http://community.OpenNETCF.com

"Kid" <Kid@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:C09F0798-F8E3-42AE-907E-A17144277477@microsoft.com...
> Hi
>
> Should WinCE BSP or driver engineer study circuitry for driver development
> ,
> or it is
> hardware engineer work only ?
>
> Thank you.

Andrew
Mon Apr 14 03:42:19 PDT 2008

I think that if you just had software knowledge you would struggle to
cope with a BSP port, and to a slightly lesser extent write a driver.

You don't necessarily need to know how to read a schematic if you have
someone to hand to explain what is going on. You will have to
understand how to read the software related information from a
datasheet and you may need to know how to set up a device to make a
piece of hardware work properly - often devices can be configured in
more than one mode of operation and the hardware is usually designed
to work in perhaps only one of the available modes.

If you understand the following, then you're probably on your way to
writing BSP's and drivers:

1. Interrupts
2. Caches ... knowing what to do with cached and non-cached memory
3. Memory management units ... knowing the difference between physical
and virtual addresses
4. Pipelining in bus interface controllers ... knowing that the bus
interface controller might execute bus accesses in a different order
to the instruction order run by the CPU

Hope this helps,
Andrew.


On Apr 13, 3:06=A0pm, Kid <K...@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote:
> Hi
>
> Should WinCE BSP or driver engineer study circuitry for driver development=
,
> or it is
> hardware engineer work only ?
>
> Thank you.

Valter
Mon Apr 14 04:33:40 PDT 2008

=?Utf-8?B?S2lk?= <Kid@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in
news:C09F0798-F8E3-42AE-907E-A17144277477@microsoft.com:

> Hi
>
> Should WinCE BSP or driver engineer study circuitry for driver
> development , or it is
> hardware engineer work only ?
>
> Thank you.

I agree with Chris and Andrew.
Knowing circuitry is not mandatory, but having to request this kind of
information bit by bit to the hardware guys is not so confortable.
And knowing something about that will made you conquer the respect of
the hardware guys. They hate software-only people :)

Just to add my 0.1 euro cents to the other replies I should add that
sometimes knowing the hardware and how to use an oscilloscope or a
logic analyzer is very useful to understand why thing are not working
as espected or where a problem lies. Being able to check if the
interrupt line of a level-based peripheral device is stuck at the
interrupt level is a good sample of this.
And Hardware guys will never admit their mistakes until you prove them
with an oscilloscope!


--
Valter Minute
www.fortechembeddedlabs.it
Training, support and development for Windows CE
(the reply address of this message is invalid)