NI uses Productronica 2005 to display its wares

Productronica 2005 is providing National Instruments (NI) with an ideal opportunity to exhibit its latest virtual instrumentation (VI) software and hardware technologies.

At Productronica 2005 in Munich, Germany, National Instruments is exhibiting virtual instrumentation (VI) software and hardware technologies for developing distributed instrumentation systems.

With open software, an instrumentation system can take advantage of multiple bus technologies, including USB, LAN/Ethernet, GPIB, PCI and PCI Express, depending on the application's requirements for performance, ease of use and distance between nodes.

As an industry leader in instrument control, NI recently announced National Instruments LabVIEW 8, which includes new functionality for automatically downloading and installing LabVIEW Plug and Play instrument drivers.

Engineers can choose drivers for more than 4000 instruments from over 200 vendors on the firm's web site, including more than 90 USB instruments and more than 270 LAN/Ethernet instruments.

These drivers seamlessly connect any instrument to NI LabVIEW by abstracting the bus between the instrument and the PC, regardless of bus choice.

For distributed system synchronisation, NI demonstrates today at Productronica the new NI PCI-1588 interface, the industry's first IEEE 1588 PCI device for distributed synchronisation over LAN.

Using the IEEE 1588 precision time protocol technology, this interface provides a solution for engineers synchronising multiple devices over LAN with sub-microsecond precision.

For greater precision in a local system, NI also shows how engineers can use built-in synchronisation features in PXI for shared reference clocks, sample clocks, triggers and events.

For high-performance modular instrumentation systems, NI demonstrates how buses such as PCI and PCI Express can provide both the highest bandwidth and lowest latency possible.

For PCs and laptops with PCI Express and ExpressCard slots, the company is showing new MXI devices that deliver up to 110Mbit/s of sustained throughput with PXI/CompactPCI systems - a 40% improvement over previous MXI solutions.

For the next generation in industrial high-bandwidth, low-latency instrumentation systems, NI also is previewing the new PXI Express standard passed by the PXI Systems Alliance in September, which increases PXI system bandwidth by 45X to 2 Gbit/s per slot while preserving backward compatibility with existing PXI systems.

The company also is demonstrating this compatibility between PXI Express and existing PXI modules and backplanes.

For distributed applications with extreme distances between nodes, LabVIEW 8 includes new functionality for sharing information among multiple LabVIEW intelligent nodes across the network with a single consistent interface.

This same technology also can be used between local LabVIEW intelligent nodes, whereas in standard text-based languages or in previous versions of LabVIEW, this communication required significant programming and unique protocols for different nodes.

This innovative new functionality makes developing a distributed application as straightforward as developing an application for a single instrument, so engineers can easily design, distribute and synchronise instrumentation systems.

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