System SourceMeter® Instrument Reference Manual Section 2:
2600BS-901-01 Rev. B / May 2013 2-99
Instrument driver types
There are several different styles of instrument drivers. Keithley Instruments provides three different
instrument drivers for the Series 2600B: A native LabVIEW driver, an IVI-C driver, and an IVI-COM
driver. You need to pick the style that best suits the application development environment (ADE) that
you are using. For example, if you are using LabVIEW, you would pick a native LabVIEW driver. If a
native LabVIEW driver is not available then you can use an IVI-C driver as LabVIEW has the option of
creating a wrapper for the IVI-C driver.
LabVIEW supports IVI-COM drivers but they are definitely not the first or second choice. However, if it
is the only driver type for the instrument, it can be used.
If LabWindows/CVI or C/C++ is your programming language, an IVI-C driver is the best option. For
VB6 and any .NET language (C#, VB.NET, and so on), an IVI-COM driver would be the best option.
Sometimes instrument vendors do not provide all three driver types. Most languages can
accommodate other driver types, but this is not optimal.
The following sections describe the different driver types in more detail.
VXIPnP drivers
VXI (Vixie) plug-and-play (VXIPnP) style drivers are Win32 DLLs that have some standard functions
defined by the VXIPnP Alliance, such as:
• init
• close
• error_message
• reset
• self_test
• Read
• Initiate
• Fetch
• Abort
The application programming interface (API) was defined so that users of instruments would have a
familiar API from instrument to instrument. There are some basic guidelines when creating APIs for
your instrument, such as using VISA data types and how to construct the CVI hierarchy.
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