The IVI Foundation

The IVI Foundation is an organization of end-users, instrument vendors, and system integrators who share a common commitment to promote the success of test system developers through open, powerful, instrument control technology. The IVI Foundation has extended the VXIplug&play instrument driver standards to incorporate features such as instrument interchangeability, execution performance, and test development flexibility. The IVI model achieves these advances without introducing additional complexity or performance overhead. Although IVI instrument drivers comply with the VXIplug&play standard, they have many additional features. The following items are some of the most important features:

• Hardware Independence—IVI class instrument drivers allow developers to build systems that reuse their test programs with different instruments. The benefits of instrument interchangeability extend to a wide variety of applications. The following are a few examples:
• Test system developers in the military and aerospace industries, who must maintain test systems and code for many years, can easily reuse their test code on new equipment as instruments improve or become obsolete.
• Manufacturers in competitive, high-volume industries, such as telecommunications and consumer electronics, can keep their production lines running when instruments malfunction or must be recalibrated.
• Large companies can easily reuse and share test code between departments and remote sites without being required to use the same instrumentation hardware.
• Instrument State Caching—Standard VXIplug&play drivers do not keep track of the state of the instrument. Therefore, each measurement function sets up the instrument for the measurement even if the instrument is already configured correctly. IVI drivers automatically cache the current state of the instrument. An IVI instrument driver function performs instrument I/O only when the instrument settings are different from what the function requires. This seemingly minor difference in approach can lead to reductions in test time and cost.
• Instrument Simulation—IVI drivers can simulate the operation of an instrument when that instrument is not available. Developers can enable simulation in IVI drivers to create simulated data for output parameters. With simulated data, developers can develop stable code for instruments even when the instruments are not available.

Refer to IVI System Architecture for a comprehensive list of IVI features.