Research On Interchangeability Of Virtual RF Signal Generator

As the establishment of VXI Plug & Play (VPP), the technical issues relevant to instrument driver, such as naming convention, development framework and soft-panel design format have been solved, making the instrument drivers from different manufacturers interoperable. Nevertheless, there are still some problems in the instrument programming and testing, for example, whether we can change the test software while replacing some obsolete instruments; whether we can transplant the testing code to different instruments; whether we can make a test package applicable for test system formed by different kinds of instruments.Interchangeable Virtual Instruments (IVI) is proposed for answering these questions. IVI is a revolutionary standard for instrument driver software technology. IVI builds on the VPP specifications and incorporates new features that address issues such as system performance,development flexibility, and instrument interchangeability.IVI drivers also take advantage of the power of the VISA I/O library defined by VPP to seamlessly communicatewith instruments across different I/O buses such as GPIB,VXI, PXI, Serial, Ethernet, and USB. Through the analysis of the IVI technology, this paper proposes the designs of the driver of radio-frequency signal generator, including the configuration files and the configuration tools. It also expounds the designs of class driver and specific driver. On the basis of them, an Automatic Test System (ATS) of radio-frequency signal generator is designed, and its verification of the interchangeability is proved, which shows that the ATS of radio-frequency signal generator realizes the independence between the ATS and the physical instruments and achieves the purpose of interchangeability.