Dr. Truchard: 40-year investment will pay off over next 40 years

Aug. 3, 2016

Austin, TX. Dr. James Truchard opened the NIWeek Tuesday keynote session looking back 40 years to National Instruments’ founding in 1976. Forty years of investment, he said, has prepared NI well for the next 40 years.

“We’ve worked determinedly to create the platform we now enjoy,” he said, which combines hardware and software into virtual instrumentation. The software approach, he said, allows you to preserve your investment while taking advantage of Moore’s law.

In 2010, he said, software took center stage for test and measurement applications. Software succeeds the vacuum tube, with General Radio a key player, and the transistor, with Hewlett-Packard dominant in the test-and-measurement space.

He thanked attendees for their role as the user community coming together to develop hundreds of thousands of applications. The user community, he said, “…provides the backbone of what we do.”

Looking forward, he said, it’s clear that test and measurement and embedded applications are two market spaces that can be served with the same hardware and software, with user-defined and user-designed instruments serving in the design and test of converged devices. He presented his familiar V diagram, with system implementation on the bottom, test on the right, and design on the left, with shared IP as a product progresses from the component to system level.

A key trend, he said, is the need to bring real world into the test process. A connected car is a converged device with mechanical inputs and outputs as well as radios and telematics. “All need to be tested at one time with one system,” he said. “You can’t use discrete boxes to test separately.”

Eric Starkloff, executive vice president for sales and marketing, then presided over a series of new product demonstrations, with each product designed to contend with exponentially progressing disruptive innovation. “We’ve essentially digitized the world to permit Moore’s Law scaling,” he said. As did Dr. Truchard, Starkloff acknowledged the role of NI’s customers and partners. The 5,000 people in the keynote auditorium, he said, represent a larger R&D team than any single company can field. “That’s the power of an ecosystem,” he said.

As for product introductions, NI is bringing big-iron ATE capability to the PXI form factor with the NI PXIe-6570 digital pattern instrument and NI Digital Pattern Editor, according to Anita Salmon, senior program manager for semiconductor test. The instrument was designed with semiconductor production test engineers in mind, she said, but it also accessible to characterization and validation engineers, who have typically not had ready access to ATE-class equipment. (Click for more.)

Here are some other products presented during the keynote session:

  • LabVIEW 2016 (click for more),
  • Enthought’s Python integration toolkit for LabVIEW,
  • Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s Edgeline EL1000 and EL4000 converged IoT systems,
  • TestStand 2016,
  • Hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) simulators (click for more),
  • the PXIe-4135 source-measure unit, and
  • the NI PXIe-5840 second-generation vector signal transceiver. (Click for more.)

(See also “Optimal+ targets electronics manufacturing with Release 6.5,” “Averna launches infotainment RF source based on NI’s VST,” and “NIWeek gets underway, Seica debuts high-frequency flying prober.”)

Applications highlighted during the Tuesday keynote session covered outer space, aerospace, and the industrial space. Videos of the application demonstrations will be available soon at http://www.ni.com/niweek/.

About the Author

Rick Nelson | Contributing Editor

Rick is currently Contributing Technical Editor. He was Executive Editor for EE in 2011-2018. Previously he served on several publications, including EDN and Vision Systems Design, and has received awards for signed editorials from the American Society of Business Publication Editors. He began as a design engineer at General Electric and Litton Industries and earned a BSEE degree from Penn State.

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