##CONTINUE##
"The challenging world economy is forcing more companies to look at alternatives to their existing test engineering strategies," said Eric Starkloff, vice president of product marketing for test and measurement at National Instruments. "More engineers than ever before are turning to software-defined instrumentation and the latest commercial technologies to achieve significant performance and flexibility gains while reducing their overall cost of test."
In a release, the National Instruments described the three trends:
- Growth of Software-Defined Instrumentation. Software-defined instruments, also known as virtual instruments, consist of modular hardware and user-defined software that give engineers the ability to combine standard and user-defined measurements with custom data processing using common hardware components. This flexibility has become critical as electronic devices such as next-generation navigation systems and smart phones integrate diverse capabilities and rapidly adopt new communication standards. Using software-defined instruments, engineers rapidly can reconfigure their test equipment by modifying software algorithms to meet changing test requirements.
- Increased Adoption of Parallel Processing Technologies. Multicore technology has become a standard feature in automated test systems and a necessity for today's electronic devices that are processing large amounts of data. Software-defined instrumentation takes advantage of the latest multicore processors and high-speed bus technologies to generate, capture, analyze and process the gigabytes of data required to properly design and test electronic devices. Multicore architectures can present a challenge when used with traditional text-based programming environments that are not inherently parallel and require low-level programming techniques. However, test engineers quickly can realize the benefits of multicore technology through inherently parallel programming environments such as LabVIEW, which automatically distributes multithreaded applications across multiple computing cores for maximum performance and throughput.
- Expansion of Wireless and Protocol-Aware Test. In addition to emerging technological advances, software-defined instrumentation has proved ideal for rapid-growth areas such as wireless and protocol-aware test. For example, consumer electronics devices including cell phones and automotive in-dash entertainment systems often integrate multiple communication protocols and standards such as GPS, WiMAX and WLAN. Test engineers using traditional instruments have to wait for a dominant standard to emerge and then for vendors to develop a dedicated, stand-alone box instrument to test that standard. With software-defined instruments, engineers can test multiple standards using common modular hardware components and implement emerging and custom wireless protocols and algorithms in their test systems regardless of the maturity of a new wireless standard.
((Comments on this story may be sent to newsdesk@closeupmedia.com))
For full details on National Instruments Cp (NATI) click here. National Instruments Cp (NATI) has Short Term PowerRatings of 4. Details on National Instruments Cp (NATI) Short Term PowerRatings is available at This Link.
-----------------------------BY Close-Up Media via COMTEX
Source：TRADING MARKETS.com
© 2009 The Connors Group, Inc.
Posts
0 comments:
Post a Comment