National Instruments worldwide virtual instrumentation conference and exhibition, NIDays 2008, kicked off in Singapore at St Regis Hotel on Friday January 11, 2008. Delivering his keynote address at the opening, Mr Chandran Nair, Managing Director of NI for the Asean region, said that National Instruments has made some dynamic improvements to several of its offerings, primarily with LabVIEW 8.5, and that he was excited at the challenges that the improved virtual instrumentation tool could address.
Each year, thousands of engineers, researchers scientists and industry experts involved in test, control and embedded design attend this conference and exhibition for the latest software and hardware innovations which offer greater flexibility, faster development and increased system performance. Many learn how to improve performance and reduce costs in their applications, and realize how solutions based on National Instruments products save both time and money, while maintaining flexibility and longevity.
NI LabVIEW 8.5: Simplifying multicore, FPGA application development
Several highly informative technical sessions on software technologies were also presented. Of particular focus at this year’s NIDays were the latest developments in LabVIEW 8.5. This latest version of the graphical system design platform for test, control and embedded system development, LabVIEW 8.5 builds on nearly 10 years of investment in multithreading technology. It simplifies multicore as well as FPGA-based application development with its intuitive parallel dataflow language. As processor manufacturers look to parallel multicore architectures for performance improvements, LabVIEW 8.5 running on these new processors, delivers faster test throughput, more efficient processor-intensive analyses, and more reliable real-time systems on dedicated processor cores. LabVIEW 8.5 also extends the LabVIEW platform further into embedded and industrial applications with the new statechart design module for modeling and implementing system behavior as well as new I/O libraries and analysis functions for industrial monitoring and control.
Other features of LabVIEW 8.5 include:
· Prevent VI cross-linking and synchronize folders to disk with the improved LabVIEW Project
· Merge different versions of graphical LabVIEW code into a single VI
· Manage LabVIEW memory usage and optimize performance with new block diagram structures
· Assign time-critical tasks to specific processor cores on multicore systems (LabVIEW Real-Time Module)
· Quickly develop complex systems using LabVIEW statechart programming (LabVIEW Statechart Module)
National Instruments
