This chapter describes the hardware (device) driver architecture for µC/TCP-IP. In order to understand the concepts discussed in this guide, you should be familiar with networking principles, the TCP/IP stack, real-time operating systems, microcontrollers and processors.

µC/TCP-IP operates with a variety of network devices. Currently, µC/TCP-IP supports wired and wireless Ethernet type interface controllers and will support serial, PPP, USB and other popular interfaces in future releases.

There are many Ethernet controllers available on the market and each requires a driver to work with µC/TCP-IP. The amount of code needed to port a specific device to µC/TCP-IP greatly depends on device complexity.

If a driver for your hardware is not already available, you can develop a driver as described in this book. The best approach is to modify an already existing device driver with your device’s specific code, following the Micrium coding convention for consistency. It is also possible to adapt drivers written for other TCP/IP stacks, especially if the driver code is short and it is a matter of simply copying data to and from the device.

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