Microsoft Corporation’s Xbox 360™ system provides the ultimate gaming console offering and an unsurpassed gaming and entertainment experience. To control Xbox 360, Microsoft offers wired and wireless controllers that boast precision, speed and accuracy. The controllers are all based on the ever-growing USB protocol.

With over 3 billion devices using standard USB connectivity in the market, USB has emerged as the de-facto standard for connecting host PCs and user peripherals. Revolutionizing the PC world, USB host capabilities have by now migrated to the embedded arena penetrating Game consoles, Set-Top Boxes, Mobile Phones, Digital Cameras and Medical Devices. The USB seamless, high speed, driverless interface has enabled these embedded hosts to communicate directly with peripherals such as flash memory applications, HID devices and portable electronic equipment.

Microsoft’s Xbox 360 accessories group chose Jungo’s leading WinDriver USB for Windows® to develop its testing applications for the validation process of Xbox 360 USB accessories and for testing during the development of the various input devices. Microsoft used the testing modules internally to test the Xbox 360 gamepad USB interface during firmware development. Following the development, Microsoft integrated WinDriver into the manufacturing line to validate the functionality of all devices in production. This allowed Microsoft to support and maintain a single development and testing environment.

“We selected WinDriver after testing it and finding that it worked well for many of our needs”,
said Greg Smith, Firmware Engineer with Microsoft’s Xbox development team.

“The WinDriver’s ease of implementation and generic capabilities allowed us to quickly gain access to our USB devices and insure that we will be able to add additional testing logic as requirements evolve in the future”.

Microsoft’s requirements for the testing modules included interfacing via an ActiveX® control to allow various software applications to communicate with its USB peripherals. The application driver offers a simple API to communicate with Xbox devices supporting both the interrupt and the control pipes as required by most I/O devices.