National Instruments launches LabVIEW 8.20

BANGALORE: In alignment with the company’s vision for evolving virtual instrumentation into graphical system design, National Instruments launched LabVIEW 8.20, the 20th anniversary edition of the LabVIEW graphical system design platform for test, control and embedded system development at NIDays 2006, the leading virtual instrumentation conference.

National Instruments India, R&D centre in Bangalore has contributed to the development of LabVIEW 8.20

In addition to the 20th anniversary of LabVIEW, 2006 also marks the 30th anniversary of National Instruments. National Instruments pioneered the concept of virtual instrumentation – combining open, flexible software and modular hardware with commercial off-the-shelf technologies – to offer engineers and scientists a user-defined approach to creating more efficient and customizable solutions.

Virtual instrumentation is now evolving into graphical system design to transform the way engineers design, prototype and deploy their complex, next-generation systems. Graphical system design provides design engineers with accelerated product development cycles that will help businesses to cut time to market and sustain a competitive advantage.

This revolutionary approach blends intuitive LabVIEW graphical programming and flexible commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware, to help engineers and scientists more efficiently design, prototype, and deploy embedded systems.

As India establishes itself as one of the most dynamic and fastest growing economies in the world, it is essential for businesses in the country to build and maintain efficiencies.

With higher-level tools such as NI LabVIEW, system-level engineers and domain experts (with little to no embedded expertise) can accurately work with systems of increased complexity and scale, thereby drastically reducing the time from design to deployment.

“India is one of the most active countries when it comes to engineering and we are excited to introduce the latest edition of LabVIEW to the region,” said John Graff, NI Vice President of Marketing and Customer Operations.

“India is one of the fastest growing National Instruments branches and very important for the global strategy of our company. India is graduating a large number of engineers each year and the region is responsible for much of the cutting-edge engineering work being done in Asia. Over the past 20 years, LabVIEW has revolutionized the way engineers and scientists work through a graphical system design and test approach. LabVIEW 8.20 combines an open design platform that embraces multiple tools and design approaches with powerful, custom measurement capabilities to streamline product development through an integrated design, prototyping and deployment platform.”

LabVIEW has been a success in test & measurement applications in the India, including over 25,000 companies focused on research, automated test equipment, automotive, RF and wireless applications and more.

“As LabVIEW crosses its 20th year anniversary, it is very exciting to see the various applications being developed in India and the innovation spirit of the Indian engineer, “ said Jayaram Pillai, Branch Manager for India, Russia, and Arabia. “LabVIEW 8.20 will open new doors towards embedded programming and offers LabVIEW users in India a new dimension of flexibility in designing their applications.”

LabVIEW 8.20 delivers significant business benefits through its ease of taking measurements with Express technology, powerful tools to facilitate large application development, and integration with design tools. The latest version streamlines the design, prototyping and deployment of real-time and embedded designs on NI CompactRIO or PXI hardware platforms, as well as standard desktop computers, FPGAs or custom board designs – all using the same graphical programming approach.

Additional features include supporting textual math in graphical dataflow programming through the LabVIEW MathScript. Now, users can directly reuse code in M files in their LabVIEW programs to leverage the best of math-oriented designs with graphical programming.

LabVIEW 8.20 also reinforces ease of use by streamlining the prototyping and deployment of real-time embedded designs on NI CompactRIO or PXI hardware platforms, as well as standard desktop computers, FPGAs or custom board designs – all using the same graphical programming approach.

The new LabVIEW FPGA Wizard automatically generates I/O code and timing structures for a quicker way to design prototype systems directly in FPGA hardware for custom, real-time I/O systems. Engineers can easily implement these FPGA-based targets on plug-in boards in a standard desktop PC for fast, low-cost system prototyping.

© CIOL Bureau