Supplied Software; Instrument Driver Types - Tektronix KEITHLEY System SourceMeter 2636B Reference Manual

Series 2600B System SourceMeter® Instrument Reference Manual

Supplied software

The majority of software applications and all instrument drivers from Keithley Instruments depend on
some, or all, of the following software components:
•
TM
NI-VISA
•
VISA shared components
•
IVI shared components
•
NI TM CVI
•
TM TM
NI IVI
•
Keithley instrument driver
These software components are available for download from the
(tek.com/product-support).

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
they are the only driver types for the instrument, they can be used.
If LabWindows/CVI or C/C++ is your programming language, an IVI-C driver is the best option. For
®
Microsoft Visual Basic
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.
2600BS-901-01 Rev. E / January 2019
TM runtime engine
compliance package
®
6.0 and any .NET language (C#, VB.NET, and so on), an IVI-COM driver is
Section 2: Installation
Product Support web page
2-13