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NI and Siemens in co-operative development move

A National Instruments product story
Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team Apr 25, 2001

National Instruments and the Automation and Drives Group of Siemens AG have announced a cooperative effort to develop measurement and automation solutions for measurement and control in manufacturing

National Instruments and the Automation and Drives Group of Siemens AG today announced a cooperative effort to develop measurement and automation solutions for a wide range of applications requiring precise measurement and control of manufacturing processes.

The announcement was made at the annual industrial trade fair in Hanover, Germany.

The working relationship brings together Siemens strength in manufacturing automation and control with the leadership of NI in automated test and measurement.

Officials from both companies said that this initiative is aimed at enabling engineers to make more sophisticated measurements on their processes and to feed that information back to their control systems.

In turn, they can make more informed decisions that ultimately improve overall manufacturing quality and efficiency.

"For many years, NI has embarked on a strategy of taking measurement technology to more diverse applications and industries," said John Graff, NI Vice President of Marketing.

"Now, engineers in industries ranging from semiconductor to automotive can improve their overall manufacturing efficiency using these well integrated solutions from Siemens and NI." Siegfried Oblasser, Siemens Vice President of Simatic Systems added, "together, we can offer well integrated industrial measurement solutions to a broad array of industries that already benefit from Siemens control systems." The initiative begins with integration of National Instruments PC-based industrial measurement products and Siemens leading Simatic WinAC PC-based manufacturing automation systems.

With time, NI and Siemens plan to develop higher-level measurement and automation solutions that span the entire length of a factory floor or other production facility.

With the first step of this cooperative initiative, engineers can use WinAC with NI measurement and signal conditioning hardware to create higher-speed control applications that monitor the condition and performance of factory floor equipment.

Using WinAC control software with standard PCs, industrial computers, or PXI systems, engineers can use Siemens STEP 7 programming software to develop control applications that run on a PC with Windows NT.

STEP 7 is the standard software environment used for programming all Siemens Simatic hardware, including PLCs, PCs, and operator panels.

NI also is developing an application for its LabVIEW graphical development environment to communicate with Siemens WinAC control software.

LabVIEW is among the world's most innovative software for measurement applications.

Engineers using WinAC now can integrate advanced, high-speed measurements from LabVIEW into their control applications.

With WinAC for control and LabVIEW for higher-speed measurement and monitoring, such as vibration analysis, engineers can perform machine control and monitoring in a more integrated fashion.

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