Hardware stack

I am a device driver developer and Unibrain, the company I work for, produces what's called a software stack. In plain text this means several pieces of software that are layered, one on top of the other. Each piece uses the services of the layer below it and provides services to the layer above it.

In Windows kernel programming the concept of "device stack" is prevalent. One device object attached to another device object, attached to another device object, etc.

This is a pretty common concept in software engineering.
Mind you, software stacks in the above sense have nothing to do with the "stack" data structure.

Although I am not a hardware engineer, as far as I can tell a concept similar to a software stack does not exist for hardware. Hardware components are definitely combined together, but the combination usually is on a side-by-side basis, not one layer on top of another on top of another etc.

If you search the Internet with "Hardware Stack" you will mostly find items describing hardware support for the stack as a data structure.

Anyway, one day, being in a funny mood, I decided to implement my own a hardware stack or device stack if you prefer. Here's what it looks like!

Btw this is a really expensive stack (five digits in USD).

Have fun!
Dimitris Staikos

Comments

[Michael]

I would argue that a "hardware stack" does, in fact, exist. After all, isn't a hardware component itself an abstraction of the "next layer down", which is a set of boards, which themselves abstract sets of chips, which themselves abstract sets of gates, which in turn abstract the spooky world of electrodynamics? How is that not a stack, which is nothing more than some number of layers of abstraction?