National Instruments Continues Advancement of IVI Instrument Driver Software

National Instruments today announced the NI Interchangeable Virtual Instruments (IVI) Compliance Package 2.2, the latest version of the company’s software package that contains IVI class drivers and support libraries necessary for the development and implementation of applications that use instrument interchangeability. With the new software package, military and aerospace test system developers who require interchangeability with their instruments now can quickly and easily develop IVI-compliant instrument drivers.

Using the IVI Compliance Package 2.2, engineers now can fully edit their instrument driver software module items in Measurement & Automation Explorer (MAX). The updated software package includes a utility for creating an IVI-compliant installer for an IVI-C instrument-specific driver. Also, the IVI Specific Driver Test Suite now provides tools for examining the behavior, structure and function panels of an IVI-C instrument-specific driver and for verifying that the driver complies with the latest IVI Foundation specifications. IVI-C instrument drivers are based on ANSI C, a long-established standard available on all platforms.

The IVI Compliance Package is one of many tools available from National Instruments to help engineers create and use quality, IVI-compliant instrument drivers to deliver interchangeability and performance. These include development environments such as NI LabVIEW and NI LabWindows/CVI that seamlessly integrate IVI drivers as well as the LabWindows/CVI IVI-C driver development wizard. NI is an active IVI Foundation member and continues to invest in delivering long-term interchangeability solutions to the military and aerospace communities.

Engineers can download the NI IVI Compliance Package 2.2 at www.ni.com/ivi/ivi_prod.htm.

About IVI
The IVI Foundation was established in 1998 to create instrument driver standards that build on the VXIplug&play specifications and provide additional features including driver API consistency, interchangeability, simulation, state-caching and multithread safety. These features help increase the life of test systems that use IVI. The IVI Foundation defines two fundamental architectures and interface types, IVI-C and IVI-COM. IVI-C drivers are based on the existing VXIplug&play specifications and standard ANSI C programming models. IVI-COM drivers are based on the standard COM (Component Object Model) technology from Microsoft. IVI instrument drivers work in popular development environments including National Instruments LabVIEW and LabWindows/CVI; Agilent VEE Pro; and Microsoft Visual Basic, Visual C++ and Visual C# .NET.

About National Instruments
National Instruments (www.ni.com) is a technology pioneer and leader in virtual instrumentation – a revolutionary concept that has changed the way engineers and scientists in industry, government and academia approach measurement and automation. Leveraging the PC and its related technologies, virtual instrumentation increases productivity and lowers costs through easy-to-integrate software, such as the NI LabVIEW graphical development environment, and modular hardware, such as PXI modules for data acquisition, instrument control and machine vision. Headquartered in Austin, Texas, NI has more than 3,100 employees and direct operations in 41 countries. In 2003, the company sold products to more than 25,000 companies in 90 countries. For the past five years, FORTUNE magazine named NI one of the 100 best companies to work for in America.