UC Berkeley Establishes NI Lab

National Instruments and the University of California, Berkeley, College of Engineering, announced the opening of the school's NI Embedded Systems Laboratory. The lab, equipped with NI technologies like LabVIEW graphical development environment and LabVIEW Real-Time, offers electrical engineering and computer sciences (EECS) students a new graphical system design environment to design, prototype and deploy their projects. All students in the UC Berkeley EECS department will be able to explore aspects of embedded systems design from core concepts like models of computation, concurrency and tool-supported design methodologies to sensors and actuators, data acquisition, and interfacing. The lab also incorporates real-world applications like mechatronics, robotics and controls systems. "By using commercial-grade products to apply practical knowledge and classroom theories with real-world applications, NI and UC Berkeley are working to address the complexities of teaching and engineering education," Ray Almgren, vice president of academic marketing at NI, said in a statement. "Only by industry and academia working together can we create a paradigm shift in the way engineers are taught and prepared for tomorrow's environment." Students will focus on RF, embedded systems design, test and mechatronics topics while receiving real-world experience in the design, prototyping and deployment stages of embedded systems. The lab includes 12 workstations, four of which offer NI PXI chassis with modular instrumentation including arbitrary waveform generators, digitizers, multimeters, power supplies and USB data acquisition hardware.