NI the provider of solutions that enable engineers and scientists to solve the world’s greatest engineering challenges, announced the LabVIEW Communications System Design Suite, which combines software defined radio (SDR) hardware with a comprehensive software design flow to help engineers prototype 5G systems.
Mr. Satish Mohanram, Technical Marketing Manager, National Instruments spoke to Vaishali of Electronics Maker about the product targeted market segments, the growth strategy & innovations, new engagements and future roadmap.
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Elaborate upon theLabVIEW as a modern design approach.
Graphical system design is a modern approach to designing, prototyping, and deploying embedded systems. It combines open graphical programming with hardware to dramatically simplify development.
Embedded designers are challenged to deliver high-quality products and services at a faster pace. With the NI’s approach to graphical system design it is possible to realize benefits which were previously not available with traditional design tools.
Prototyping is a crucial part of the embedded design process. The ability to demonstrate and show your idea functioning to investors, customers and management is a great way to get your idea into someone’s budget. LabVIEW is at the center of the National Instrument’s platform. Providing comprehensive tools that you need to build any measurement or control application in dramatically less time, LabVIEW is the ideal development environment for innovation, discovery, and accelerated results. Combine the power of LabVIEW software with modular, reconfigurable hardware to overcome the ever-increasing complexity involved in delivering measurement and control systems on time and under budget.
LabVIEW can program ready-to-run NI hardware with built-in processors, FPGAs and I/O to prototype medical, green, robotics and industrial machine control applications faster.
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Let us know about the important features incorporated in your LabVIEW Design Communication Suite?
In this particular framework, LabVIEW Communications System Design Suite has incorporated very tight integration. Wireless prototyping was previously undertaken by separate design teams using different design tools. The LabVIEW Communications environment enables the entire design team to map an idea from algorithm to FPGA using a single high-level representation. This approach empowers designers to focus on innovation instead of implementation, which increases the rate and quality of their prototyping.
LabVIEW Communicationsis optimized for the SDR platform with a hardware-aware design environment that provides control of physical configuration, hardware constraints and system documentation in a functional software diagram. This adds the flexibility of the hardware to the software, which gives designers access to all components in the SDR platform. Using this deeply integrated solution helps designers achieve optimal performance by eliminating the need to manually map algorithms to different hardware.
As society connects and shares more devices and data across networks, there is unprecedented demand for technology that will help today’s system designers. While signal processing and communications designers work to define algorithms that overcome pressing challenges regarding bandwidth, security, power efficiency and coexistence, there is a void in prototyping solutions with real-world signals.
LabVIEW Communications offers a unified design flow for communications system prototyping. It is a single, cohesive design environment that can target both the processor and FPGA. This hardware-aware design environment includes SystemDesigner, which allows designers to validate system setup, access system documentation, describe the system architecture, configure system components, and partition and deploy algorithms to hardware. This hardware-software integration also provides access to I/O and resources, eliminating the need for middleware and driver development.
The advanced compiler technology found in LabVIEW Communications enables considerable flexibility and eases algorithm descriptions dictating how they will map and perform on SDR hardware.
Users can rely on new Application Frameworks available with LabVIEW Communications to further expedite their design cycle. Application Frameworks provide documented, modifiable, standards-based source code for LTE and 802.11 PHYs. Designers can focus their efforts on the specific components to improve over existing LTE and 802.11 designs, instead of spending time building the requisite infrastructure needed to properly test the novel algorithms.
Today’s system designers require a design flow that realizes the true potential of SDRs for rapid prototyping. LabVIEW Communications provides a seamless path from algorithm to prototype, helping designers innovate faster. Researchers have access to intuitive, high-level languages that enable efficient algorithm design and system abstraction. The hardware-aware nature of the software with SDR hardware allows for accurate, real-world I/O integration. LabVIEW Communications will help designers outpace competitors in the race to define standards for 5G and other future communications systems.
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Can you share with us details of the Time saving factor while using the LabVIEW Communications system Design Suite?
The customer shard with us their experience of how much time they saved using this approach as compared to past.
To give a perspective it could be anywhere. In traditional approach it could be taking as much as few years to prototype a communication system. With LabVIEW Communications it came down to few weeks. It means tremendous time saving in design the system.
Below are some quotes from customers.
“Wireless consumers’ insatiable demand for bandwidth has forced the wireless community to invest tremendously in new ways to increase network capacity. At TU-Dresden, we’re heavily involved in 5G exploration using NI hardware and software integration. With our collaboration, and the use of the NI platform, TU-Dresden researchers significantly compressed the time to transition from concept to prototype. In six weeks, we were able to have a working prototype. In the past, using other standard tools, that would have taken us more than two years to complete.”
– Gerhard Fettweis, Vodafone Chair
“We began surveying different platforms and technologies, and we contacted Ahsan {NI} about a possible collaboration. After investigating LabVIEW and the NI platform, we chose to work with NI to build our 5G PoC system.”
– Mark Cudak, Principal Research Specialist at Nokia, Nokia Networks
“We used LabVIEW Communications System Design Suite to develop a realtime prototype on NI FPGA hardware for our work on state-of-the-art error control coding algorithms for future wireless communications. We chose LabVIEW Communications because of its capability to translate a high-level design into an efficient FPGA implementation.”
– Dr. Predrag Spasojevic, Associate Professor, WINLAB, Rutgers University
“Real-world testbeds are crucial for pushing the state-of-the-art in wireless innovation, because modeling, simulation, and theoretical analyses are often based upon approximations and simplifying assumptions. LabVIEW Communications and NI SDRs enable truly rapid prototyping of advanced real-time wireless systems, allowing the algorithms and theories we develop to be experimental validated and thus more relevant and compelling.”
– Dr. J. Nicholas Laneman, Director of the Wireless Institute and Professor of Electrical Engineering, University of Notre Dame
“We are using LabVIEW Communications Design Suite at Virginia Tech to introduce non-engineers / non-FPGA experts to develop algorithms for FPGA IP implementation. The tool suite features an innovative user interface that provides wide variety of entry and analysis tools just within a few intuitive key strokes or mouse clicks, allowing the designer to focus on algorithm development. Extending from its LabVIEW roots, the graphical nature of this tool is crafted to easily capture both data flow and control flow aspects of an algorithm. And it has a ZOOM button!”
– Dr. Peter Athanas, Professor, Virginia Tech Univeristy
“This development took us about one calendar year, half the time it would have taken with other approaches. Because of the flexibility of the platform we were able to experiment with different PHY and MAC algorithms quickly. Our plan is to continue to evolve this prototype to encompass more aspects of a real-world network such as handover, multiple user scenarios etc.”
– Dr. Amitava Ghosh, Head of Broadband Wireless Innovation, Nokia Networks
- What is your expectation in the Indian market in terms of product growth?
I cannot talk in terms of numbers, but surely I can say that India has the biggest set of RF and communication engineers, be it a company or academic institutions. There are lots of people working on algorithms which can be optimizedto further develop the communication system. This particular tool will be best suited for these people who are trying to prototype the system and become productive. We are contributing towards a better connected world.
