AUSTIN, Texas, Aug. 7, 2008 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- NIWeek -- Executives
from National Instruments (Nasdaq: NATI) discussed how NI products and
technologies improve everyday life during the 14th annual NIWeek graphical
system design conference and exhibition. Speaking to nearly 2,800 engineers
and scientists, NI executives showcased customers' green engineering
applications, demonstrated new products and future technologies that deliver
increased performance and efficiency and highlighted initiatives that are
preparing students for careers in science and technology.
Dr. James Truchard, NI president, CEO and co-founder, kicked off NIWeek
2008 by discussing how customers are using NI products to improve the
environment in a variety of applications, from increasing the efficiency of
diesel engines to creating renewable energy and reducing the downtime of
industrial machines. Truchard explained that customers use NI LabVIEW
graphical programming and hardware such as NI CompactRIO to identify and
measure real-world problems as well as to design more efficient and
environmentally friendly applications that solve those problems.
"National Instruments provides the tools to help engineers turn
measurements into better designs," Truchard said. "Customers use LabVIEW and
our hardware to solve the world's problems and create new ideas on how we can
be more energy efficient and environmentally sensitive -- from windmills to
steel mills."
Following Truchard, NI Senior Vice President of R&D Tim Dehne demonstrated
performance improvements available through new NI products including LabVIEW
8.6, Wi-Fi and Ethernet data acquisition devices, the NI Single-Board RIO
deployment platform and PXI Express-based 6.6 GHz RF instruments. These new
products offer improved measurement capability to handle sophisticated test
and measurement applications and a wider variety of deployment options for
industrial and embedded applications. Dehne also highlighted customer
applications that have benefitted from a graphical system design approach
including a control system that decreases the electricity consumption of air
conditioning systems and a fire suppression system for cargo planes.
NI Business and Technology Fellow Mike Santori opened the second day of
NIWeek 2008 by outlining how LabVIEW has evolved into a graphical system
design tool that gives engineers and scientists increasing capabilities to
develop more advanced test, measurement, data acquisition and embedded design
applications. Santori demonstrated LabVIEW features currently in development
including optimized multicore capabilities for LabVIEW MathScript,
configuration-based dynamic testing, a system diagram tool for higher-level
abstraction and a wireless sensor network solution for creating custom
measurements in environmental monitoring.
Jeff Kodosky, NI co-founder, business and technology fellow and "father of
LabVIEW," closed the second day keynote by highlighting the challenge of
machine architecture changes including multicore processors and field-
programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). Kodosky pointed out that applications are
becoming increasingly complex and require the acquisition, mining and analysis
of large data amounts into the petabyte range. With the movement of industry
trends toward highly parallel machines and ever larger distributed data sets,
Kodosky stated that LabVIEW graphical dataflow programming makes the software
ideal for these new advanced applications.
"When you use LabVIEW for your designs, you are future-proofed," Kodosky
said. "Regardless of how computer architecture evolves, multicore to many-core
or super-FPGAs to self-timed FPGAs, graphical dataflow programming has it
covered."
Ray Almgren, vice president of academic relations, closed NIWeek 2008 by
emphasizing the importance of getting students of all ages interested in
science, technology, engineering and math. Almgren highlighted the NI
collaborations with LEGO(R) Education on the LEGO WeDo(TM) educational
robotics platform as well as with the FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition
of Science and Technology) Robotics Competition as examples of how industry
and academia can work together to transform today's students into the
innovative engineers of tomorrow.
National Instruments (http://www.ni.com) is transforming the way engineers
and scientists design, prototype and deploy systems for measurement,
automation and embedded applications. NI empowers customers with off-the-shelf
software such as NI LabVIEW and modular cost-effective hardware, and sells to
a broad base of more than 25,000 different companies worldwide, with no one
customer representing more than 3 percent of revenue and no one industry
representing more than 10 percent of revenue. Headquartered in Austin, Texas,
NI has more than 4,800 employees and direct operations in nearly 40 countries.
For the past nine years, FORTUNE magazine has named NI one of the 100 best
companies to work for in America. Readers can obtain investment information
from the company's investor relations department by calling (512) 683-5090,
e-mailing nati@ni.com or visiting http://www.ni.com/nati.
CompactRIO, LabVIEW, National Instruments, NI, ni.com and NIWeek are
trademarks of National Instruments. Other product and company names listed are
trademarks or trade names of their respective companies.
LEGO, WeDo and their respective logos are trademarks of the LEGO Group.
(C) 2008 The LEGO Group.
.gif)
