The Exoplanet Characterisation Observatory (EChO) mission was one of the proposed candidates for the European Space Agency’s third medium mission within the Cosmic Vision Framework. EChO was designed to observe the spectra from transiting exo-planets in the 0.55–11 micron band with a goal of covering from 0.4 to 16 micron. The mission and its associated scientific instrument has undergone a rigorous technical evaluation phase. This paper provides an overview of the payload instrument design for the mission, showing how the system acts together to fulfill the mission objectives. We report on the results of an extensive simulation of the instrument performance and show that EChO would have been photon noise dominated for targets from a faint limit similar to GJ1214 to the brightest targets similar to 55Cnc.