Celebrating 50 Years of NI

Ritu Favre talks about NI’s Nigel AI test and measurement platform.

William G. Wong

Related To:

Electronic Design

May 19, 2026

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What you’ll learn:

50^th Anniversary of NI (National Instruments).
40^th Anniversary of LabVIEW.
What’s new with LabVIEW’s Nigel AI.

Ritu Favre, Dr. T (Truchard), Kevin Schultz

National Instruments (NI) started 50 years ago by Dr. T (Truchard) along with Jeff Kodosky and Bill Nowlin. NI recently became part of Emerson. He was joined by Ritu Favre, President, Test and Measurement Business Group, and Kevin Schultz (CTO) at this year’s NI Connect 2026 in Fort Worth, Texas. In this episode of Inside Electronics, I talk with Ritu Favre about NI in general and about LabVIEW’s Nigel AI.

One of the things we discuss is NI’s graphical programming environment, LabVIEW. LabVIEW, which turns 40 years old, started out on Apple’s Macintosh (see figure). LabVIEW has come a long way and now targets all sorts of compute platforms from CPUs to GPUs and FPGAs.

This year marks the 40th anniversary of LabVIEW.

NI Connect 2026 was both a celebration as well as a presentation of the latest test and measurement hardware and software, including the latest incarnation of Nigel AI. Nigel AI is a focused generative AI solution trained on NI’s technology and documentation.

About the Author

William G. Wong

Senior Content Director - Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF

I am Editor of Electronic Design focusing on embedded, software, and systems. As Senior Content Director, I also manage Microwaves & RF and I work with a great team of editors to provide engineers, programmers, developers and technical managers with interesting and useful articles and videos on a regular basis. Check out our free newsletters to see the latest content.

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I earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Computer Science from Rutgers University. I still do a bit of programming using everything from C and C++ to Rust and Ada/SPARK. I do a bit of PHP programming for Drupal websites. I have posted a few Drupal modules.

I still get a hand on software and electronic hardware. Some of this can be found on our Kit Close-Up video series. You can also see me on many of our TechXchange Talk videos. I am interested in a range of projects from robotics to artificial intelligence.