Hardware Design and Development for Windows 8

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Hardware Design and Development for Windows 8

Updated: May 31, 2012

Windows 8 builds on the fundamentals of Windows 7 by providing richer security features, starting up faster, and running longer on your choice of devices and chipsets. Windows 8 extends these fundamental features with a new touch-optimized interface. Windows 8 also provides the platform to create a whole new generation of full-screen apps that are based on modern web standards and available through the new Windows Store. For Windows 8, we’ve redesigned the PC experience and built upon everything you already appreciate about Windows.

On this page, we’ve gathered current technical guidance and documentation about what’s new for hardware designers, engineers, testers, and driver developers in Windows 8.

Developing Drivers with Windows 8 Tools

With the Windows 8 release of the Windows Driver Kit (WDK) and the Windows Debugger Extensions for Visual Studio, you can integrate your driver development and debugging environments into Microsoft Visual Studio. Most of the tools you need for coding, building, packaging, testing, debugging, and deploying a driver are available in the Visual Studio user interface.

Windows Hardware Certification

You can now submit your devices, systems and drivers for Windows 8 certification using the Windows Dev Center Hardware Dashboard. Register or sign in using the Dashboard tab at the top of this page to submit Windows Hardware Certification Kit packages, device metadata, drivers for distribution, and to view telemetry reports for Windows 8 and other supported versions of Windows.

If you create hardware products or drivers, we strongly encourage you to learn more about Hardware Certification, its benefits to you and your customers, and to use the new requirements and policies for Windows 8. Certifying your products for Windows 8 helps ensure your products and drivers take full advantage of all that Windows 8 has to offer. Download the Windows Hardware Certification Kit (HCK) Release Preview to get the tools, processes, and tests to certify hardware for Windows 8 and all supported versions of Windows.

Universal Serial Bus (USB) 3.0

Windows 8 provides a new USB driver stack to support USB 3.0 devices. The new stack includes drivers that are loaded by Windows when a USB 3.0 device is attached to an xHCI host controller. The new drivers are based on the Kernel Mode Driver Framework (KMDF) and implement features defined in the USB 3.0 specification.

Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI)

Windows 8 provides additional support for security features to help to prevent unauthorized firmware, operating systems, or UEFI drivers from running at boot time. These features include Secure Boot and support for factory-encrypted drives. UEFI firmware is required to support large disks (over 2 TB). This firmware can also provide faster boot and resume speeds, by reading and using data more efficiently.

You can find current technical information about UEFI in the following topics in the Microsoft Assessment and Deployment Kit (ADK) Technical Reference Guide. You can learn more and download the ADK from this location.

Deploying Windows to UEFI Firmware Overview
Secure Boot
Factory-Encrypted Drive

Windows 8 Device Experience: Metro style Device Apps

Windows 8 introduces several improvements to the way users can discover and use the devices that are connected to and contained in their PC. Windows 8 can detect nearby devices in the home, automatically making them available for use. Windows 8 can also automatically install a Metro style device app from the Windows Store, when users connect their device for the first time. This way, users don’t have to search for the companion software that goes with their device.

SEE ALSO

Sensors

For Windows 7, the only inbox sensor driver supported a single device—the ambient light sensor. In contrast, Windows 8 includes a new HID class driver that supports a virtually unlimited universe of sensors. This driver provides native support for sixteen specific categories of sensors. In addition, OEMs and IHVs will find support for sensors outside of these categories by using the Custom or Generic classes in the driver.

Proximity

Proximity in Windows 8 supports near-field communication devices that enable communication between computers using a tap gesture. Proximity supports establishing a connection between peer applications on separate computers with a tap, and subscribing for and publishing of messages while devices are within proximate range.

What’s New in the Windows Driver Kit

This section summarizes major additions and revisions to the Microsoft Windows Driver Kit (WDK) documentation for Windows 8. The changes described in the following topics include revisions to the WDK and new features of the Windows operating system that affect the design and development of drivers. This information will be useful to both new and experienced driver developers.