National Instruments UK & Ireland Among Industry Leaders at Test & Measurement Design Day

Attendees will experience hands-on sessions and technical presentations by industry experts, including Ian Bell, National Instruments UK & Ireland Technical Marketing Director, who will introduce three key technologies for test and measurement and outline a software-defined test system architecture which promotes performance, flexibility and re-use.



“Just as software drives new capabilities in electronic products, it is also impacting the systems used to test these devices both at the design stage and through into manufacturing” said Bell. “The pace of change in technologies and communications protocols demands that modern test systems be software-defined, whether they are single instruments or complete automated test architectures. The right software architecture is an essential technology for modern test systems. For example, it provides the infrastructure to accommodate any test device on any bus at the same time as delivering the flexibility to address rapidly changing communications standards.



Software is also the key to addressing the challenge that new processors present to test engineers. To continue realising performance gains without increased clock rates, processor manufacturers have developed processors with multiple cores on a single chip. With multicore processors, test engineers can develop automated test applications capable of achieving high throughput through concurrent processing. The inherent parallelism of graphical dataflow software, like National Instruments LabVIEW, helps engineers immediately benefit from multicore processors and overcome the complexity associated with traditional text-based languages.



Finally, more manufacturers are including FPGAs on modular instruments and giving engineers the access in software to reprogram them according to their requirements. For example, test engineers can embed a custom algorithm into the device to perform in-line processing inside the FPGA or emulate part of the system that requires a real-time response. New system-level software tools are emerging so engineers can rapidly configure FPGAs without writing low-level VHDL code.”