Development Status and Characteristics of Virtual Instrument Technology

The virtual instrument system concept is a major breakthrough in the concept of traditional instruments, and is a combination of computer systems and instrument system technology. It utilizes the powerful functions of the computer system, combined with the corresponding hardware, greatly breaks through the limitations of traditional instruments in data processing, display, transmission, processing, etc., so that users can easily maintain, expand, upgrade and so on.

Virtual instrumentation systems can be used in a wide variety of applications in communications, automation, semiconductor, aerospace, electronics, power, biopharmaceutical, and industrial production.

The existing virtual instrument system can be divided into virtual instruments based on PC bus, virtual instruments based on VXI, and virtual instruments based on PXI. The application occasions have their own characteristics.

Virtual instrumentation technology uses high-performance modular hardware combined with efficient and flexible software to perform a variety of test, measurement and automation applications. Flexible and efficient software can help you create a fully customizable user interface. Modular hardware can easily provide a full range of system integration. Standard hardware and software platforms meet the needs of synchronous and timing applications. This is why NI has been leading the development of the test and measurement industry for nearly 30 years. Only with the three components of efficient software, modular I/O hardware and hardware and software platforms for integration, can virtual instrument technology be used to achieve high performance, scalability, low development time, and excellent integration. Great advantage.

The three major components of virtual instrument technology, first of all, are efficient software, which is the most important part of virtual instrument technology. With the right software tools and by designing or calling specific program modules, engineers and scientists can efficiently create their own applications and friendly human-computer interaction interfaces. NI's industry-standard graphical programming software, LabVIEW, not only makes it easy to connect to a variety of hardware and software, but also provides powerful subsequent data processing capabilities, setting up data processing, conversion, and storage methods. The results are displayed to the user. In addition, NI offers more interactive measurement tools and higher-level system management software tools such as interactive software SignalExpress for connection design and testing, LabWindows/CVI for traditional C, Measurement Studio for Microsoft Visual Studio, etc. And so on, can meet the needs of customers for high-performance applications. With powerful software, you can create intelligence and decision-making capabilities in your instrument to take advantage of the power of virtual instrumentation in test applications. Second is modular I/O hardware. In the face of today's increasingly complex test and measurement applications, NI offers a full range of hardware and software solutions. Whether you are using PCI, PXI, PCMCIA, USB or 1394 bus, NI offers modular hardware products ranging from data acquisition, signal conditioning, sound and vibration measurement, vision, motion, instrument control, and distribution. Industrial communications such as I/O to CAN interfaces are available. NI's high-performance hardware products, combined with flexible development software, create a fully customizable measurement system for engineers responsible for testing and design to meet a variety of unique application requirements. At present, NI has reached the speed of launching a hardware product every 2 working days, which greatly broadens the user's choice: for example, NI's new generation of data acquisition equipment - 20 M series DAQ cards introduced earlier, Set new standards for the data collection field. Finally, the software and hardware platform for integration. NI's first PXI hardware platform designed for test tasks has become the standard platform for today's test, measurement, and automation applications. Its open architecture, flexibility, and cost advantages of PC technology have brought a touch to the measurement and automation industry. The earth-shaking reforms. The NI-sponsored PXI Systems Alliance has attracted 68 vendors, and the number of products under the Alliance has soared to nearly a thousand. PXI is a modular instrumentation platform tailored for industrial data acquisition and automation applications with built-in high-end timing and triggering buses, combined with various modular I/O hardware and corresponding test and measurement development software. You can build a fully custom test and measurement solution. Whether it's a simple data acquisition application or a high-end mixed-signal simultaneous acquisition, you can handle it with PXI's high-performance hardware platform. This is the unparalleled advantage that virtual instrumentation brings to you.

At the same time, the four advantages of virtual instrument technology

First, high performance

Virtual instrument technology is based on PC technology, so it completely "inherits" the advantages of the latest commercial technology dominated by off-the-shelf PC technology, including superb processor and file I/O. Complex analysis can be performed in real time while data is being imported into the disk at high speed. In addition, the evolving Internet and faster computer networks make virtual instrumentation a more powerful advantage.

Second, strong scalability

NI's hardware and software tools make engineers and scientists no longer in the current technology. Thanks to the flexibility of NI software, simply updating your computer or measuring hardware can improve your entire system with minimal hardware investment and minimal or no software upgrades. When you're leveraging the latest technology, you can integrate them into your existing measurement equipment and ultimately speed time-to-market at a fraction of the cost.

Third, less development time

At both the driver and application levels, NI's efficient software architecture combines the latest technologies in computing, instrumentation, and communications. NI designed this software architecture to be user-friendly, while providing flexibility and powerful features that make it easy to configure, create, publish, maintain, and modify high-performance, low-cost measurement and control solutions. .

Fourth, seamless integration

Virtual instrument technology is essentially an integrated software and hardware concept. As products continue to become more complex in function, engineers often need to integrate multiple measurement devices to meet the full testing needs, and connecting and integrating these different devices always takes a lot of time. NI's virtual instrument software platform provides a standard interface to all I/O devices, helping users easily integrate multiple measurement devices into a single system, reducing task complexity.

Virtual instrumentation technology continues to expand its capabilities and applications. LabVIEW can now not only develop test programs on a PC, but also design hardware on embedded processors and FPGAs. This technology will eventually provide such a stand-alone environment that allows users to design functions from the test system to define the hardware, as shown in Figure 3. Test engineers will be able to use the appropriate features for system level design. When they need to define specialized measurement functions, they will also be able to "fine" to the appropriate level with the same software tools to define the function of the measurement. For example, engineers can develop LabVIEW programs to perform certain measurements, such as DC voltage and rise time, using modular instruments. When engineers need to develop specialized measurements, they can also use LabVIEW to analyze raw measurement data to develop specialized measurements, such as peak detection. If in some cases they need to use some new hardware features to implement measurements, such as custom triggers, they can use LabVIEW to define a trigger and filter scheme and embed it in the FPGA on the instrument card.

Virtual instrumentation technology has become the dominant technology for test, industrial I/O, and control and product design. As the functionality and performance of virtual instrumentation technology has continually improved, it has become a major alternative to traditional instruments in many applications. As PC, semiconductor, and software functions are further updated, future advances in virtual instrumentation technology will provide an excellent model for test system design and give engineers the power and flexibility to measure and control.

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