IVIIVI Architecture IVI is an integral component of a complete National Instruments test system. IVI sits above the VISA I/O layer in the program hierarchy and is integrated into the application development environments that National Instruments provides. The IVI architecture breaks the traditional instrument driver into two parts – an instrument-specific driver and a class driver. The instrument-specific driver functions the way traditional instrument drivers have in the past, but with an underlying architecture that is optimized for performance and includes instrument simulation. The class instrument driver contains generic functions for controlling an instrument category and calls the corresponding instrument-specific driver functions at run time. You can write your test program with either the class driver or the specific driver, but only programs written to the class driver are interchangeable.
In addition, the IVI Foundation has defined the IVI architecture to work with two interface technologies, one based on the ANSI C standard and one on Microsoft COM (Component Object Model) technology. The two architecture types are designed to be interoperable. The IVI drivers that National Instruments provides are based on the IVI-C architecture, as it offers many benefits over IVI-COM (see a more detailed comparison of IVI-C vs. IVI-COM):
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