Virtual instrument technology has been widely used in the field of test and measurement. With the continuous innovation of LabVIEW software and hundreds of measurement hardware devices, the virtual instrument technology gradually expands the range of applications it touches. This article extends this technology to the control and design sections. It mainly introduces some practical applications of virtual instrument technology in product testing, control and design for everyone to understand.
Virtual instrument technology has been widely used in the field of test and measurement. With the continuous innovation of LabVIEW software and hundreds of measurement hardware devices, the virtual instrument technology gradually expands the range of applications it touches. Today, NI is the first to extend this technology to control and design. The benefits that once promoted the development of testing are beginning to accelerate the development of control and design. Engineers and scientists continue to increase the requirements for virtual instruments in order to effectively meet the needs of the world, they are the driving force behind this acceleration.
Application of Virtual Instrument Technology in Testing
Testing has always been a field of mature application of virtual instrument technology. More than 25,000 companies (mostly test and measurement companies) are using NI's virtual instrument technology. Now, many companies are rapidly adopting products with digital performance up to 200MS / s. The PXI System Alliance has more than 60 members and provides hundreds of products, and tens of thousands of R & D, verification and product test engineers and scientists are using thousands of instrument drivers.
Moreover, customers now have an increasing demand for testing. As the pace of innovation is getting faster and faster, the pressure to hope that more competitive new products will be put on the market faster is also increasing. Consumer expectations are constantly increasing. Taking the electronic market as an example, consumers require different functions to be integrated in a smaller space at a lower cost. The economic downturn in recent years has not prevented the need for innovation, but it requires the use of fewer resources. Meeting these needs is a factor in business success-companies that can meet these needs quickly, consistently, and most reliably must have a decisive advantage in the competition.
All these conditions drive high requirements for new verification, inspection and production testing techniques. A test platform that can keep pace with innovation is not optional, but necessary. This platform must include rapid test development tools with sufficient adaptability to be used throughout the product development process. The need for rapid time-to-market and efficient production of products requires high-throughput testing techniques. In order to test the complex and versatile products required by consumers, accurate simultaneous measurement capabilities are required, and as companies continue to innovate to provide competitive products, the test system must be able to quickly adjust to meet new testing needs.
Virtual instruments are an innovative solution to these challenges. It combines rapid software development with modular, flexible hardware to create user-defined test systems. The virtual instrument provides:
Intuitive software tools for rapid test development
Fast and accurate modular I / O based on innovative commercial technology
PC-based platform with integrated synchronization to achieve high accuracy and high throughput
An example of recent NI accelerated test, control, and design innovations is FPGA-based hardware that uses LabVIEW FPGA for programming. If the engineer needs a new hardware performance, such as an onboard DSP, or a new trigger mode, you can even define this performance in the same software and apply it to the onboard FPGA. Previously, engineers and scientists could use LabVIEW and modular I / O to create highly integrated user-defined systems, but now they can also extend customizable configuration functions to the hardware itself. This user-configurable function and transparency will improve the way engineers build test systems.
Figure 1. LabVIEW provides user-definable instruments and customizable hardware
Application of Virtual Instrument Technology in Industrial I / O and Control
PC and PLC play a very important role in control and industrial applications. PC brings greater software flexibility and more performance, while PLC provides excellent stability and reliability. But as control requirements become more and more complex, improving performance while maintaining stability and reliability has become a recognized need.
Independent industry experts have realized the need for tools, which should be able to meet the growing need for more complex, dynamic, adaptive and algorithm-based control. PAC is the demand of industry and the answer of virtual instrument technology.
An independent research company defined a programmable automatic controller (PAC) to solve this problem. Craig Resnick of ARC Research Institute defines PAC as:
Multi-domain functions (logic, motion, drive and process)-This concept supports multiple I / O types. The integration of logic, motion and other functions is a requirement of the growing complexity of control methods
Single multi-disciplinary development platform-a single development environment must be able to support various I / O and control schemes
Software tool for designing applications across multiple machines or processing units-this software tool must be able to adapt to distributed operations
A set of defacto network and language standards-this technology must utilize high-input technology
Open, modular architecture-The design and technical standards and specifications must be open, modular, and integratable PACs in the implementation to increase the stability and reliability of the PLC to the flexibility of PC software. LabVIEW software and a stable, real-time control hardware platform are perfect for creating PACs.
Application of Virtual Instrument Technology in Product Design
Design engineers using various simulation design tools must use hardware to test design prototypes. Usually, there is no good interface between the design phase and the test / verification phase, which means that the design must go through a completion phase before entering the test / verification phase. Problems discovered during the testing phase need to be repeated in the design phase.
Figure 2. Testing plays a vital role in the design and production of today's electronic devices
In fact, the development process has two completely different and separate phases-design and testing are two separate entities. In terms of design, EDA tool manufacturers are under tremendous pressure to interact with the growing requirements of the semiconductor design and production group. Engineers and scientists require that as products go from schematic design to simulation to the physical layer, EDA should have the ability to reuse design from one tool to other tools. Similarly, test system development is moving towards a modular approach. The gap between these two worlds has traditionally been neglected until it was first noticed in the new product prototype design stage. Traditionally, at this stage, product designers used benchtop instruments to compare physical prototypes with their designs and perform integrity checks to obtain correctness. Designers manually make measurements, probe circuits on their instruments and monitor signals to find problems or performance limitations. As the design repeatedly undergoes the build-measure-adjust-rebuild process, the designer needs the same measurement again. In addition, these measurements can be very complex—requiring frequency, amplitude, and temperature to vary with the data collected and analyzed throughout. Because engineers focus on design tools, they are reluctant to learn how to automate their tests.
Systems with inherently integrated attributes are easy to expand and can adapt to growing product functions. Once a new test is required, the engineer simply adds a new module to the platform to complete the measurement. The flexibility of virtual instrument software and the modularization of virtual instrument hardware make virtual instruments necessary to accelerate the development cycle.
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