Introduction
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vendor’s instrument and not need to relearn the commands. Also commands that
are common to all drivers, such as Initialize and Close, are identical regardless of
the type of instrument. This commonality lets you spend less time hunting around
the help files and programming an instrument, leaving more time to get your job
done.
That was the motivation behind the development of IVI drivers.The IVI
specifications enable drivers with a consistent and high standard of quality,
usability, and completeness. The specifications define an open driver architecture,
a set of instrument classes, and shared software components. Together these
provide consistency and ease of use, as well as the crucial elements needed for
the advanced features IVI drivers support: instrument simulation, automatic range
checking,
state caching, and interchangeability
.
The IVI Foundation has created IVI class specifications that define the capabilities
for drivers for the following eight instrument classes:
IVI Class Compliant drivers usually also include capability that is not part of the IVI
Class. It is common for instruments that are part of a class to have numerous
functions that are beyond the scope of the class definition. This may be because
the capability is not common to all instruments of the class or because the
instrument offers some control that is more refined than what the class defines.
IVI also defines custom drivers. Custom drivers are used for instruments that are
not members of a class. For example, there is not a class definition for network
analyzers, so a network analyzer
driver must be a custom driver. Custom drivers
provide the same consistency and benefits described below for an IVI driver,
except interchangeability.
Class IVI Driver
Digital multimeter (DMM) IviDmm
Oscilloscope IviScope
Arbitrary waveform/function generator IviFgen
DC power supply IviDCPwr
Switch IviSwitch
Power meter IviPwrMeter
Spectrum analyzer IviSpecAn
RF signal generator IviRFSigGen
