National Instruments and Agilent Technologies to Increase LabVIEW Support for Agilent Instruments

“The control and use of test instruments can be a daunting task in today's fast-to-market environment, and multi-company test platforms are a very real challenge, said Scott Sampl, Vice President and General Manager of Agilent’s Systems Products Division. “Through our combined efforts with National Instruments, we can significantly speed up the availability of high-quality LabVIEW drivers for our new instruments to ensure test developers achieve fast and seamless integration in their test systems.

Today, more than 750 Agilent instruments are supported by National Instruments, and the drivers for those instruments are free and available for download from the NI Instrument Driver Network at www.ni.com/idnet. With this new initiative, Agilent plans to provide National Instruments with early access to its new products so NI can develop native LabVIEW Plug-and-Play instrument drivers. This cooperative effort facilitates the timely delivery of drivers whose functionality reflects the instruments’ full capabilities.

“Working with Agilent to create LabVIEW instrument drivers guarantees that engineers and scientists can easily create tightly integrated measurement and automation systems,” said Eric Starkloff, Director of Test Product Marketing for NI. “This effort is part of our ongoing commitment to provide an open platform for automating and controlling instruments over any communication bus, including GPIB, LAN-based LXI, PCI Express, PXI, Serial or USB.”