Specifications

3
Agilent Technologies IVI-COM driver and VISA-COM I/O
programming examples in Microsoft Visual C#
Agilent Technologies offers a full suite of IVI-COM instrument drivers and
Visual C# programming examples for remote instrument control. The drivers
and programming examples are available as free downloads from the Agilent
Technologies website. IVI Shared Components are also required; these are
available as a free download from the IVI Foundation website.
Agilent Technologies IVI-COM drivers use a low-level VISA-COM interface to
communicate with instruments over GPIB and/or USB interfaces. This means a
program using the IVI-COM driver can be used with an instrument connected to
the computer with either a GPIB cable or a USB cable.
Agilent Technologies also details how to communicate with instruments using
the lower-level VISA-COM I/O libraries in Visual C#. Examples are included in
this application note.
What is an instrument driver?
An instrument driver is a software program that can be used to control a
programmable instrument, like a PRBS generator, BER tester, oscilloscope,
switch matrix, or a simple DC power supply. The software program is comprised
of individual routines that control a particular function of the instrument, like
configuring options, writing data, reading data, and triggering the instrument.
Instrument drivers simplify instrument control and reduce test development time
by providing an easier method to interface with the instrument. If you want to
integrate an Agilent Technologies instrument into a pre-existing test system, or
to build a new test system, we recommend you use the Agilent Technologies
instrument driver when writing software to communicate with the instrument.
What is an IVI driver?
IVI drivers are a standardized instrument application programming interface
(API). The driver encapsulates the instrument SCPI command stack and
presents the instrument functionality in a consistent manner to many different
Application Development Environments (ADEs).
What this means in practice is that an IVI driver converts an object-oriented
class-based command like:
N4965A multi-channel BERT controller.Channels.get_Item(“1”).Generator.
Pattern.Name = Agilent TechnologiesN4965A multi-channel BERT
controllerGeneratorPatternEnum.PRBS31
into the following SCPI command that is sent to the appropriate instrument:
:GEN:DATA:PATT:NAME PRBS31 (@1)