Development Status and Characteristics of Virtual Instrument Technology

The concept of the virtual instrument system is a major breakthrough in the concept of traditional instruments and is a product of the combination of computer systems and instrumentation systems. It makes use of the powerful functions of the computer system, combined with the corresponding hardware, and greatly breaks the limitations of traditional instruments in data processing, display, transmission, processing, etc., enabling users to easily maintain, extend, and upgrade them.

The virtual instrument system can be widely used in communications, automation, semiconductor, aerospace, electronics, electric power, biochemical pharmaceuticals, 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 scenarios have their own characteristics.

Virtual instrument technology is to use high-performance modular hardware, combined with efficient and flexible software to complete a variety of test, measurement and automation applications. Flexible and efficient software can help you create a completely customized user interface, modular hardware can easily provide a full range of system integration, standard software and hardware platforms to meet the needs of synchronous and timing applications. This is exactly why NI has been leading the development of the test and measurement industry for the past 30 years. Only with the three components of efficient software, modular I/O hardware, and hardware and software platform for integration can we give full play to virtual instrument technology with high performance, scalability, low development time, and excellent integration. Great advantage.

The three major components of virtual instrument technology are firstly efficient software, and software is the most important part of virtual instrument technology. Using the right software tools and by designing or calling specific program modules, engineers and scientists can efficiently create their own applications and friendly human-machine interfaces. LabVIEW, the industry-standard graphical programming software provided by NI Corporation, can not only easily and conveniently complete the connection with various hardware and software, but also provide powerful follow-up data processing capabilities, and set the data processing, conversion, and storage methods. The result is displayed to the user. In addition, NI provides more interactive measurement tools and higher-level systems management software tools, such as SignalExpress Express for interactive design and testing, LabWindows/CVI for legacy C, Measurement Studio for Microsoft Visual Studio, etc. And so on, can meet the customer's demand for high-performance applications. With powerful software, you can create intelligence and decision-making capabilities in the instrument to take advantage of virtual instrumentation technology's powerful advantages in test applications. This is followed by modular I/O hardware. In the face of today’s increasingly complex test and measurement applications, NI offers a full range of software and hardware solutions. Whether you use PCI, PXI, PCMCIA, USB, or 1394 buses, NI offers modular hardware products from data acquisition, signal conditioning, sound and vibration measurement, vision, motion, instrument control, distribution Industrial I/O to CAN interfaces and other industrial communications, everything. NI's high-performance hardware products, combined with flexible development software, can create fully customized measurement systems for engineers responsible for test and design work to meet a variety of unique application requirements. At present, NI has reached the speed of launching a hardware product every 2 business days, which greatly expands the user's choice of face: For example, the new generation of data acquisition equipment recently introduced by NI - 20 M-series DAQ cards introduced earlier, Set new standards for data collection. The last is a hardware and software platform for integration. NI's first PXI hardware platform, designed specifically 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 bring a new dimension to the measurement and automation industry. The earthshaking reforms. The PXI system alliance initiated by NI has attracted 68 manufacturers, and the number of products under the alliance has also surged to nearly a thousand. PXI is a modular instrument platform tailor-made for industrial data acquisition and automation applications. It includes a high-end timing and trigger bus, and is equipped with various modular I/O hardware and corresponding test and measurement development software. , you can create a completely customized test and measurement solution. Whether it's a simple data acquisition application or high-end mixed-signal synchronous acquisition, you can handle it with PXI's high-performance hardware platform. This is the unparalleled advantage that virtual instrument technology brings to you.

At the same time, the four major advantages of virtual instrument technology First, high performance Virtual instrument technology is developed on the basis of PC technology, so completely "inherited" the advantages of the latest commercial technology led by off-the-shelf PC technology, including With its powerful processor and file I/O, you can perform complex analysis in real-time while data is being imported into the disk at high speed. In addition, the evolving Internet and faster and faster computer networks have enabled virtual instrument technology to demonstrate its stronger advantages.

Second, the scalability of NI's hardware and software tools so that engineers and scientists are no longer involved in the current technology. Thanks to the flexibility of NI software, simply update your computer or measurement hardware to improve your entire system with minimal hardware investment and minimal or no software upgrades. When using the latest technology, you can integrate them into existing measurement equipment, ultimately accelerating the time to market with less cost.

Third, the development time is less on both the drive and the application level, NI's efficient software architecture can be combined with the latest technology in computers, instrumentation and communications. National Instruments designed this software architecture to facilitate user operations while providing flexibility and powerful features that allow you to easily configure, create, publish, maintain, and modify high-performance, low-cost measurement and control solutions. .

Fourth, the seamless integration of virtual instrument technology is essentially an integrated hardware and software concept. As the functionality of products continues to become more complex, engineers often need to integrate multiple measurement devices to meet complete test requirements, and connecting and integrating these different devices always takes a lot of time. NI's virtual instrument software platform provides a standard interface for all I/O devices, helping users easily integrate multiple measurement devices into a single system, reducing task complexity.

Virtual instrument technology continues to expand its capabilities and applications. Now LabVIEW can not only develop test programs on PCs, but also design hardware on embedded processors and FPGAs. This technology will also eventually provide such an independent environment, allowing users to design the test system to define the functions of the hardware, as shown in Figure 3. Test engineers will be able to use the right features for system-level design. When they need to define a specific measurement function, they will also be able to "fineen" to the appropriate level to define the measurement function using the same software tools. For example, engineers can develop LabVIEW programs to use modular instruments for certain measurements such as DC voltage and rise time. 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 that is embedded in the FPGA on the instrument card.

Virtual instrument technology has become the mainstream technology for testing, industrial I/O, and control and product design. With the continuous improvement of the functionality and performance of virtual instrument technology, it has become a major alternative to traditional instruments in many applications today. With the further update of PC, semiconductor and software functions, the development of virtual instrument technology in the future will provide an excellent model for the design of test systems, and will enable engineers to obtain powerful functions and flexibility in measurement and control.