What is hardware enablement?

In this era of diverse software versions and newly released hardware, the issue of compatibility persists. Hardware enablement is the process of establishing the proper connection needed by the software to fully utilize the capable aspects of the hardware. Through different software elements such as device drivers and firmware development, we can achieve a seamless connection between the hardware and software. 

Let’s go into the intricacies of what we mean by hardware enablement in this Answer.

Hardware enablement is a crucial process for achieving the full potential of any hardware. This can be explained through the example of having high-end hardware in a smartphone (e.g. latest camera sensor, display, etc.) and not having the correct bridge of connections to completely utilize its capabilities. With this example, we can see that we can take basic photographs but cannot tap into the full potential of it. As software isn’t working with the hardware where the connection they establish can translate to higher integration between them.  

Intermediaries between software and hardware

Primarily, we have two categories of intermediaries or connection bridges between the software and hardware. Device drivers and firmware are the two major classifications that aid in linking.

Device drivers

These are specialized software that works to take in information from the hardware connected and translate it into instructions or in a form that is compatible and easy to understand for the operating system (OS). They function in the OS kernel layer due to device drivers needing low-level access to hardware components.

Some examples of device drivers which are essential to the OS are:

• Kernel and user-mode device drivers

• Character device drivers

• Virtual device drivers

• BIOS 

• Motherboard drivers

Firmware

This is the software inside any piece of hardware, which helps in starting up, communicating, and performing basic tasks. In layman's terms, we can picture this as ‘software for hardware’. Now this firmware can be further categorized into three different types:

• Low-level firmware: This type of firmware is used in non-volatile chips such as ROMs which cannot be modified after the specific instructions are initialized. 

• High-level firmware: This type of firmware is located in flash memory chips having complex instructions and the ability to be modified even after creation.

• Subsystems: These are devices that can be categorized as semi-independent and firmware is embedded into the CPUs and flash chips at this level.

For firmware examples, we can take a look at our mobile devices which are either Android or IOS based, both receive periodical firmware updates. These updates can enhance performance, security, and even add new features which can utilize the already available hardware in an efficient way.

For a deeper level of understanding, we have created a short assessment below.

Conclusion 

Proper communication between the hardware and software is an important aspect of hardware enablement. This in turn plays a crucial part in the ecosystem of hardware and software, leading towards higher efficiency and compatibility in the near future.