Navigating the landscape of IVI

Since its inception in August of 1998, the IVI foundation has continued to expand and evolve software standards for instrument drivers. The adoption of IVI has increased markedly during that period, particularly over the past two years, with a number of instrument vendors announcing a growing inventory of instruments shipping with IVI drivers. Additionally, end user companies as well as U.S. government agencies have helped create an expectation that newly developed instruments will be made available with IVI drivers. With this increased visibility and availability of IVI technology, there has been an increased confusion over the different types of IVI drivers available, especially when trying to determine which technology is most suitable for a particular application domain or development environment. Specifically, most organizations do not fully understand the important differences between IVI-COM and IVI-C drivers. With more driver standards on the way from the IVI foundation and with the increased involvement of the newly formed LXI consortium, a clear understanding of the full IVI technology landscape is crucial. This paper will begin with a comparison of IVI COM and IVI-C technologies, from both a driver developer and an end user perspective. It will go on to demonstrate new technology that allows both IVI-COM and IVI-C drivers to be developed and deployed together in a single component. This technology offers compelling advantages in terms of development time and cost, as well as in long term driver maintenance, while simultaneously delivering to end users the advantages of both IVI-COM and IVI-C drivers