Instrument Driver

An Instrument Driver, in the context of test and measurement (T&M) application development, is a set of software routines that simplifies remote instrument control. Instrument Drivers are specified by the IVI Foundation and define an I/O abstraction layer using Virtual Instrument Software Architecture (VISA). The VISA hardware abstraction layer provides an interface-independent communication channel to T&M instruments. Furthermore, the Instrument Drivers encapsulate the Standard Commands for Programmable Instruments (SCPI) commands, which are an ASCII-based set of commands for reading and writing instrument settings and measurement data. This standard allows an abstract way of using various programming languages to program remote-control applications instead of using SCPI commands. An Instrument Driver usually has a well-defined API.