NI expands HIL simulation platform

National Instruments (NI) has announced the expansion of its hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) simulation platform, which includes numerous products to optimise embedded system validation.

During the past six months, NI has released almost 40 products targeted at delivering flexible HIL solutions to embedded control system developers within a variety of industries.

The portfolio of NI HIL simulation tools help engineers maintain reliability and time-to-market requirements while reducing costs, even as their products become more complex.

'The NI HIL simulation platform has a highly flexible architecture to help engineers address a wide range of applications, from those in automotive and aerospace to fields such as alternative energy and medical device development,' said Mike Santori, business and technology fellow at National Instruments.

Recent product releases include NI Veristand software for real-time testing and simulation; the NI Teststand 4.2 automated test management environment including support for Python scripts; a range of fault insertion units; NI-Xnet high-performance CAN and Flexray bus interfaces optimised for HIL applications; ARINC 429, MIL-STD-1553 and AFDX (ARINC 663) military and aerospace avionics bus interfaces; low-cost and high-performance real-time processor cards; and several other I/O interfaces.

To ensure that applications can scale and meet evolving requirements, the NI HIL simulation platform supports third-party hardware interfaces and integrates with C, C++, .Net and Python programming languages.

In addition to integrating with the NI Labview graphical system design environment, the platform works with a variety of modelling environments such as The Mathworks' Simulink software, ITI SimulationX, Maplesoft Maplesim and Gamma Technologies' GT-Power.

Engineers can increase system performance and flexibility while reducing overall costs by using the open PXI hardware standard, advanced multicore technology and graphically programmed FPGA interfaces.

The platform's software-defined instrumentation approach makes it possible for HIL applications created with NI products to scale from low-cost desktop validation systems to multiprocessor distributed simulators, which provides engineers with a flexible toolset for all HIL testing applications.

The platform delivers commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) solutions that offer alternatives to complex configurations and bulky, inefficient traditional simulation systems.

NI HIL simulation products can be used to make projects more efficient and cost effective for design engineers in industries such as aerospace, alternative energy, automotive and consumer electronics to government, industrial transportation, mechatronics, medical technology and semiconductor manufacturing.

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