Arvind Kumar, Chief Editor of Electronics Maker attended NIWeek 2018 held from May 21 – 24 at Austin. He got a chance to interact with Jonah Paul, Senior Group Manager for Product Marketing, National Instruments. NIWeek brings together thousands of scientists, engineers, and industry professions to learn about all things. Here is the interview excerpts.
What is your outlook on next-generation instrumentation?
We are seeing many trends however one of the most promising technologies in this area is FPGA. Using FPGAs, engineers can define the behavior of the hardware and perform in-line processing or distributed processing on the device. FPGAs also provide faster execution because they are inherently parallel and deliver deterministic (reliable) execution. The parallel nature of LabVIEW graphical data flow, which is well suited for multicore applications, is also ideal for taking advantage of FPGA technology.
While FPGAs have been used inside of stand-alone instruments, engineers were not given access to reprogram them – a critical need for automated test. Clearly there are advantages of performing different types of processing on a host dual-core processor versus an FPGA. For example, an FPGA is generally well-suited for in-line analysis such as simple decimations on point-to-point I/O. However, complex modulation might achieve better performance running on a host processor because of the large amount of floating-point calculations required. Additionally, although FPGAs offer compelling performance and flexibility for automated test, they are programmed through hardware description languages such as Verilog or VHDL, which use low-level syntax to describe hardware behavior. Most test engineers do not have expertise in these tools.
System-level tools that abstract the details of FPGA programming can bridge this gap. LabVIEW FPGA, for example, can target onboard FPGAs and synthesize the necessary hardware directly from a LabVIEW program. The ideal solution for developing a distributed processing system is a single development environment, such as LabVIEW, that provides the ability to quickly partition the processing on the host and/or an FPGA to see which provides superior performance.
What benefit does multicore processing offer for engineers creating test systems?
Until recently, advances in computing hardware have provided significant increases in the execution speed of software, with little effort from software developers. Increases in processor speed brought an instant boost in software speed. However, as processor speeds start to peak, and processor manufacturers use new techniques to increase processing power, this is starting to change. The introduction of multicore processors provides a new challenge for software developers, who must now master the programming techniques necessary to capitalize on multicore processing potential. One of these programming techniques is task parallelism.
Task parallelism is simply the concurrent execution of independent tasks in software. Consider a single-core processor that is running a Web browser and a word-processing program at the same time. Although these applications run on separate threads, they still ultimately share the same processor. Now consider a second scenario in which the same two programs are running on a dual-core processor. On the dual-core machine, these two applications essentially can run independently of one another. Although they may share some resources that prevent them from running completely independently, the dual-core machine can handle the two parallel tasks more efficiently.
The inherent parallelism of dataflow programming makes the National Instruments LabVIEW graphical development environment the ideal programming language for using parallel programming techniques. Traditional text-based languages have a sequential syntax and are therefore difficult to visualize and organize in a parallel form. In contrast, creating a multi-threaded application is intuitive and simple in NI LabVIEW.
The LabVIEW graphical programming paradigm makes parallel programming easy, even for novice users. Two separate tasks that are not dependent on one another for data run in parallel without the need for any extra programming.
What Steps is NI Taking to ensure that Students get access to this platform and ecosystem?
LabVIEW has been a key component of the bench. There have been a number of products we have introduced alongwith LabVIEW to ensure that the students can learn through real-world experimentation. LabVIEW has provided many avenues to do this in lab settings as well as classroom settings. During NIWeek we introduced LabVIEW 2018, which includes ongoing hardware integration, inclusive of ELVIS III hardware which provides project-based learning opportunities. Students can focus on project-based interactions and do that through instrumentations interfaces, FPGA-based interfaces, and web interfaces – all of which can be interfaced through easily. Certainly, product platform is important as well as our commitment through things like academic site licenses and student versions of LabVIEW to make it financially possiblefor them to access the tools.
Tell me about LabVIEW myRIO and how it helps engineers?
For over a decade, National Instruments has been providing reconfigurable hardware paired with graphical programming to cutting-edge researchers and companies around the globe. We call our unique hardware/software approach the LabVIEW reconfigurable I/O (RIO) architecture. It is based on four components: a processor, a reconfigurable FPGA, inputs and outputs, and graphical design software. Combined, these components provide the ability to rapidly create custom hardware circuitry with high-performance I/O and unprecedented flexibility in system timing control.
When designing NI myRIO, our aim was to give students access to the same industry-grade technology they would see upon graduation; however, we know that students approach this technology with various knowledge levels and may not be ready for the advanced programming required of a professional engineer. Using the LabVIEW RIO architecture approach, we can take advantage of LabVIEW system design software to offer NI myRIO users a spectrum of programming complexity. Depending on programming knowledge, students can begin with configuration-based Express VIs and move to advanced modes of programming as they feel ready.
