Test for designers
By Maury Wright -- EDN, September 16, 2004
For years, National Instruments has been hugely successful at applying its concept of virtual instrumentation, especially in automated testing and test-oriented laboratories. The LabView environment, however, hasn’t been ideal for design engineers who need to make signal measurements in the design and prototyping stage of a project. At NI Week, which took place on August 17 through 19, in Austin, TX, however, the company announced its intention to offer products for the design process—first, for prototyping and later in the form of development tools.
NI Week included a roster of new modular instruments that engineers can meld into customized test systems. Perhaps the biggest such announcement this year was the new M Series DAQ (data-acquisition) modules, including analog-I/O, digital-I/O, and counter/timer products. Input sampling rates range from 250k to 1.25M samples/sec, and the units offer 16- to 18-bit precision. Prices start at $375.
But, this year at NI Week, the emphasis on designers stole the show. NI revealed the SignalExpress software platform, which can leverage the same virtual instruments that LabView uses. But SignalExpress provides a user interface akin to a traditional instrument rather than the more programmatic approach of LabView. The less-than-$1000 software got hearty endorsements from companies such as National Semiconductor (www.national.com) and Analog Devices (www.analog.com), which will provide models for their components that you can import to SignalExpress.
I’d expect even bigger news for designers next year. NI has previously offered ways to download and execute its virtual instruments in attached hardware platforms based on FPGAs and DSPs. The value comes in how easily you can create functions, such as filters and FFTs, using the LabView software. This year, the company showed early demos of such functions running in stand-alone hardware on a TI DSP and a Microchip microcontroller. In the past, NI has described how engineers could build prototypes using its test-oriented tools but offered no way to take such a prototype into an embedded form. The company announced no products, but spokesmen believe that LabView can morph into a graphical-development platform that allows designers to quickly move prototypes into deeply embedded designs.
National Instruments, www.ni.com.
