Virtual Instruments in the Open Source World ? A Review

Virtual instrument is the for 21st century instrumentation engineering. More and more emphasis nowadays has been placed on the designing techniques, tools used and platform dependencies of virtual instruments. This research paper focuses on reviewing the open source alternative for virtual instruments nowadays. There are several open source alternatives available to research scholars as compared to the previous decades. The virtual instruments offered by todays professional companies tend to be too costly to be used by individual research scholars. Thus a need for open source alternative to virtual instrument is strongly desired. Keeping this as the main focus, the paper describes virtual instruments philosophy and its connection to the open source world.