The instrumentation needed to perform capillary electrophoresis is relatively simple.  A basic schematic of a capillary electrophoresis system is shown in figure 1.  The systems main components are a sample vial, source and destination vials, a capillary, electrodes,  a high voltage power supply, a detector, and a data output and handling device. The source vial, destination vial and capillary are filled with an electrolyte such as an aqueous buffer solution.  To introduce the sample, the capillary inlet is placed into a vial containing the sample.  Sample is introduced into the capillary via capillary action, pressure, siphoning, or electrokinetically, and the capillary is then returned to the source vial.  The migration of the analytes is initiated by an electric field that is applied between the source and destination vials and is supplied to the electrodes by the high-voltage power supply.  In the most common mode of CE, all ions, positive or negative, are pulled through the capillary in the same direction by electroosmotic flow.  The analytes separate as they migrate due to their electrophoretic mobility, and are detected near the outlet end of the capillary. The output of the detector is sent to a data output and handling device such as an integrator or computer. The data is then displayed as an electropherogram, which reports detector response as a function of time. Separated chemical compounds appear as peaks with different migration times in an electropherogram. The technique is often attributed to James W. Jorgensen and Krynn DeArman Lukacs, who first demonstrated the capabilities of this technique. Capillary electrophoresis was first combined with mass spectrometry by Richard D. Smith and coworkers, and provides extremely high sensitivity for the analysis of very small sample sizes.  Despite the very small sample sizes (typically only a few nanoliters of liquid are introduced into the capillary), high sensitivity and sharp peaks are achieved in part due to injection strategies that result in a concentration of analytes into a narrow zone near the inlet of the capillary.  This is achieved in either pressure or electrokinetic injections simply by suspending the sample in a buffer of lower conductivity (e.g.' lower salt concentration) than the running buffer.  A process called field-amplified sample stacking (a form of isotachophoresis) results in concentration of analyte in a narrow zone at the boundary between the low-conductivity sample and the higher-conductivity running buffer.
To achieve greater sample throughput, instruments with arrays of capillaries are used to analyze many samples simultaneously.  Such capillary array electrophoresis (CAE) instruments with 16 or 96 capillaries are used for medium- to high-throughput capillary DNA sequencing, and the inlet ends of the capillaries are arrayed spatially to accept samples directly from SBS-standard footprint 96-well plates.  Certain aspects of the instrumentation (such as detection) are necessarily more complex than for a single-capillary system, but the fundamental principles of design and operation are similar to those shown in Figure 1.