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NDIS Last modified: Wednesday, May 23, 2001

Short for Network Driver Interface Specification, a Windows device driver interface that enables a single network interface card (NIC) to support multiple network protocols. For example, with NDIS a single NIC can support both TCP/IP and IPX connections. NDIS can also be used by some ISDN adapters. NDIS includes a protocol manager that accepts requests from the network driver (at the transport layer) and passes these requests to the NIC (at the data link layer). So multiple NDIS-conforming network drivers can co-exist. Also, if a computer contains multiple NICs because it is connected to more than one network, NDIS can route traffic to the correct card. NDIS was developed by Microsoft and 3COM. Novell offers a similar device driver for NetWare called Open Data-Link Interface (ODI).