NI to expand product platform

There is an increasing pressure on manufacturers and engineers to meet market requirements quickly and efficiently as the time to market decreases and products are increasingly run by computers within them. A car now has many microprocessors and is virtually run by a computer or computing platform in it.

National Instruments (NI), a Texas-based technology player in virtual instrumentation, is expanding its product platform to meet these requirements by introducing LabVIEW 8.

"With this embedded designers, test engineers and control system engineers can now use the same graphical platform for simple data transfer, determine real-time communication and network synchronisation," said Dave Wilson, director, international marketing, National Instruments.

Virtual instrumentation has increased productivity and lowered the cost for test, control and design applications through easy to integrate software.

LabVIEW 8 is an extension of NI's LabVIEW graphical development environment to deliver one seamless platform for modelling design simulation and real time implementation of control systems.

The latest version of LabVIEW presents a simplified, scalable interface for communicating with and synchronising between remote intelligent devices and systems, such as real time processors and field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), says the company.