Hardware supporting synthetic instrumentation is by definition not specific to the measurement, nor is it necessarily (or usually) modular.
Leveraging commercially available technologies, such as the PC and the analog-to-digital converter, virtual instrumentation has grown significantly since its inception in the late 1970s.
Additionally, software packages like National Instruments' LabVIEW and other graphical programming languages helped grow adoption by making it easier for non-programmers to develop systems.
The newly updated technology called "hard virtual instrumentation" is developed by some companies.
It is said that with this technology the execution of the software is done by the hardware itself which can help in fast real time processing.