Description
Universal driver is a set of C APIs available as a user level library file for quick application development on the Diamond Systems data acquisition boards. The universal driver provides a consistent interface to the user application and hides all the minute details of programming the FPGA registers from the application developer.
The Universal driver is available in many operating systems like MS-DOS 6.22, Linux 2.6.xx/2.4.x, Windows CE 6.0 and Windows 2000/XP. The universal driver provides standard interfaces for the data acquisition circuitry thus making it very easy for an application developer to port the code developed for one board to apply for any other board suppported by the driver.
Architecture
The Universal driver is built with a 3-tier architecture model. The driver comprises of....
1. API layer ( exposes the API functions for user applications )
2. Business logic layer ( provides all the register map and all the features supported by the board. This layer is internal to the driver )
3. Operating systems layer.
- The API layer provides a list of exposed functions declarations and a complete list of the defines used by the universal driver. The API layer defines provided by the header file DSCUD.H. This file MUST always be included in the source files in the application using the universal driver.
- The business logic layer provides the entire FPGA register map interface and communicates with the API layer via internal driver calls. This layer also provides the auto calibration engine. The business logig layer has an implementaion for all of the supported boards for the specific version of the universal driver.
- The operating systems layer acts as a link between the business logic layer and the underlying OS to perform low level tasks such as port I/O, interrupt handling etc.
The architecture diagram is as below...
