Securing investments with Virtual Instrumentation technology

BANGALORE, INDIA: India added close to 74million wireless subscribers in 2006 alone, taking the number of subscribers to above 146 million, as per the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI). This saw a 97 percent growth over the previous year, making India an attractive destination for mobile telephone operators, as well as equipment vendors. This phenomenal growth is a token representation of the overall scenario of the Indian economy and this potential is drawing the attention of large business houses, across the globe and across business sectors, to the relatively untapped Indian markets.

Coupling this desire for presence in a fast growing economy, with the well educated and relatively lower compensated Indian, a significant number of electronics, communications and semiconductor – R&D labs and manufacturing/assembling facilities are being setup in India by these global players. These facilities are encouraging establishment of small and medium entrepreneurs (SMEs) offering development manufacturing and assembling services at lower costs compared to equivalent service providers in the western hemisphere. However, maintaining quality at every stage, as well as testing of the products before delivery is typically part of the service requirements from these SMEs, in order to maintain the standards of the products.

Today although the Indian SMEs are bullish on growth, some concerns such as rising costs to meet increasing quality and efficiency demands, lack of innovation, need for shorter development time and fear of obsoletion of technology investments have to be addressed pronto. Virtual Instrumentation provides an innovative solution to overcome these obstacles.

Virtual Instrumentation, pioneered by National Instruments, combines mainstream commercial technologies, such as the PC, with flexible software and a wide variety of measurement and control hardware, so engineers and scientists can create user-defined systems that meet their exact application needs. 

As technology evolves, hi-tech companies are designing more complex products; at the same time trying to improve their levels of quality and reliability by executing a 100 percent test on all manufactured and assembled components. 

Increasing product complexity 

For India to maintain its price competitiveness there is an increasing need for test systems to deliver reconfigurability, flexibility, and high throughput while maintaining sufficient test coverage for the ever-increasing product complexity. Virtual Instrumentation helps in providing these benefits to its SME clients. 

Virtual Instrumentation features Modular Hardware, allowing the SMEs to reuse the original equipment, and add hardware to the same system for increased functionality and tests. This coupled with productive and powerful software such as LabVIEW, helps in reducing development times for newer test systems, design higher quality products, and lower design costs, resulting in increased efficiency and throughput. 

Virtual Instrumentation Architecture 

Since cost is of primary concern, and defines whether or not an industry survives, any investment towards testing is taken with a lot of afterthought. For example, wireless test systems for parametric tests of GSM/CDMA/EDGE/GPRS standards, though easily available, cost significantly in case an upgrade is required in response to the evolution of newer wireless standards. This increases the cost burden for SMEs.

The inherent reconfigurability of Virtual Instrumentation, rooting from the powerful software defining the hardware, allows SMEs to be innovative with the services provided. Tests such as Harmonic Distortion, Power levels etc can be easily performed using software like LabVIEW.

Virtual Instrumentation allows the EMS Companies to use the same hardware, with a modification in the software to achieve the additional test requirements, unlike the solutions provided by traditional test and measurement companies. These innovative tests, with low or no investment, can encourage clients to outsource more work to the SMEs. In this way SMEs can experiment with their testing solutions. 

Systems based on Virtual Instrumentation are maintainable and do not obsolete quickly. As this technology is based on computing technology, the support is guaranteed well into the future. Also, these solutions may be connected to any third party device or tool in the market thus providing SMEs with the much needed protection of investments and the ability to leverage the latest in technology to innovate and become more competitive in this fast paced market place. 

Leveraging the above-mentioned benefits and the global presence of National Instruments, SMEs can gain the confidence and visibility from their existing and potential clients, which allow them to become global players in today’s open markets. This versatility and power of Virtual Instrumentation technology provides enterprises with a platform for the future, where their investments are secure, making it the test platform of choice for over 25,000 companies world over.

 Author: Siddharth Jain, Field Technical Consultant, National Instruments India