The Challenge

Our customer had developed a USB Ethernet chip. They were getting a performance of 35-50 Mbps on receive and 50-80 on transmit with their existing drivers on Windows 2000. Our customer had a potential customer sampling the chip and demanded a performance of above 70 Mbps on both Transmit and Receive for buying the design. The customer had tried everything to improve performance before approaching us. 

The Solution

GRACELABS team went through the existing driver code and redesigned and modified the code. The team had regular communications and exchange of ideas with the customers' team and worked as an extended team of the customer. The team used its expertise in Intermediate/miniport driver and USB filter drivers to analyze the miniport driver behavior and improve performance. In addition to obtaining a performance of more than 90Mbps on both Receive and transmit, the team was also able to suggest some functionality improvement. The performance enhancement was done in one and half month’s time.

The Technology

The complexity of project was in Analyzing and making sure that the fault was with the device driver. Once it was confirmed that the problem is with the driver, the thorough understanding of NDIS and USB driver architecture as well as the knowledge of the Kernel and thread scheduling became very handy in improving the performance. 
The regular communication and cooperation of the customer's hardware and software teams was very helpful in achieving the result.

The Result

The performance of the driver excelled the customer requirement. It gave a performance of more than 90 Mbps. As a result the customer was very delighted and has started entrusting GRACELABS with device driver development in Windows/CE/AppleMAC.