Historical Evolution of Instrument Drivers

Although the instrument driver concept had promise, early implementations had serious limitations. Some approaches were too closely linked to proprietary development tools. Other approaches were too difficult to develop or modify. Users wanted open and modifiable drivers, built around standards that allowed instruments from a variety of vendors to peacefully coexist in one application.

The VXIplug&play systems alliance improved existing instrument driver standards. The VXIplug&play instrument driver architecture leveraged existing popular technology by building on the successful LabWindows/CVI and LabVIEW instrument driver standards.

These standards enable system interoperability. That is, you can install VXIplug&play instrument drivers from a variety of vendors on the same system without encountering system conflicts. In addition, these standards use VISA-defined data types to define parameters of all instrument driver functions. These data types promote the portability of instrument drivers to new operating systems and programming languages. Although the VXIplug&play model continues to represent a powerful instrument driver solution, it lacks several crucial features, such as, instrument interchangeability, execution performance; that is, state caching, and test development flexibility; specifically, range checking and simulation.