The LabVIEW Platform, Part I – An Open Platform for Long-Term Continuity

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This paper is the first of a series outlining the core platform benefits for design, control, and test system development using the graphical development approach. For the complete series, refer to the documents below:

Table of Contents:

	The Merging Worlds of Virtual and Physical Data

With the explosion of engineering technology over the past 20 years – whether from semiconductor performance improvements and size reduction through Moore’s Law, the ubiquity of computers and microprocessors in every industry, or the advancement of communication standards and networking – engineers must deal with an equally challenging explosion of complexity when designing, building, or testing a new product. Manual processes in these areas have given way to computer-based automated tools for design, simulation, control, inspection, and test. As the technology has improved, the challenge moves from automating individual steps or processes to integrating different tools and technologies, to automate and streamline the entire process. The best tool for a particular function loses momentum when it cannot integrate with other tools in the process. Because of this complexity, the engineers and scientists are now in need of more than just the best point solutions for the myriad tasks they must complete, but instead need a development platform that can provide a consistent foundation for compatibility and productivity

Nowhere has the move toward automation been more pronounced than in the design discipline. Whether designing electronic chips and printed circuit boards, mechanical structures, or communications signal chains, most designers in these areas start with a software tool for designing the product. A common next step is to run these designs through simulation tools in an attempt to predict their performance in several dimensions. With many of these design tools, users can import designs into separate simulation tools for this early design evaluation. From there, the next step involves automated layout or model formation and tooling to automate the actual build process.

In any design and development flow, a very clear distinction exists between the virtual world of software-based design, and simulation tools in the physical world of electronic or mechanical measurement. This divide between the virtual and the physical is where the LabVIEW platform delivers the most obvious value. Physical measurement is a completely different kind of challenge than design and simulation. Physical measurements require tight integration with a wide variety of measurement and control hardware, with optimized performance to handle huge channel counts (for the large-scale data logging required for stress-testing an airplane wing) or ultrahigh-speed throughput (RF communications testing). The LabVIEW platform has evolved to deliver unmatched performance and flexibility in the area of physical measurements. More importantly, the LabVIEW platform is open, so designers can map their measurement data against their simulation results, or even interchange their simulation and physical data for behavioral modeling in design or for driving physical tests with simulated stimuli. Even the most advanced design and simulation platforms, which encompass the latest algorithms and computer science, do not consider solving the challenges of the physical measurement part of their charter.

Engineers who recognize the need to bridge this gap between virtual and physical measurement and control are the first to grasp the importance of a platform-based approach for technical design, simulation, measurement, and control. As shown in Figure 2, physical measurement data takes on new significance throughout the entire product life cycle, and is not limited to the production control or validation testing steps that occur relatively late in the process.

Figure 2. Measurements throughout the Design and Development Life Cycle

	The Importance of Openness

If engineers are to take advantage of physical measurement data, they must employ a measurement platform that is open and compatible with their design and simulation platform of choice. The popularity of the LabVIEW platform has led to wide-scale adoption in many different design disciplines, resulting in a broad collection of integration tools, libraries, and file formats linking LabVIEW data with different design and simulation tools (see Figure 3). In addition to integration with these specific tools, LabVIEW also offers to a wide array of software standards for integration on both sides of the equation – with other software tools and packages, or with a variety of measurement resources, including:

• DLLs, shared libraries
• ActiveX, COM, and .NET (Microsoft)
• DDE, TCP/IP, UDP, Ethernet, Bluetooth
• CAN, DeviceNet, ModBus, OPC
• USB, IEEE 1394 (FireWire), RS232/485, GPIB
• Databases (ADO, SQL, etc.)

Using these general-purpose standards for communicating with both hardware and software resources, LabVIEW users can generally find a way to exchange and reuse their data when necessary.

Figure 3. LabVIEW Integration with Engineering Tools

	The Importance of Continuity

As the engineering product life cycle has moved into the virtual world of software-based design and development, it has become more exposed to the double-edged sword of software productivity – incredible advances in productivity through automation versus dealing with incredibly fast-changing software technologies upon which you must build a foundation. Engineers and scientists are using software and the personal computer as a means to a better end, whereas in other industries such as IT and Internet or enterprise-focused solutions – the software is in fact the end. The competitive forces in the software industry drive vendors to build up whole ecosystems of technologies, development tools, and experts – only to tear them down and replace them with entirely new architectures and foundations. Although this may work for the software industry, other industries involved in designing and manufacturing products (automobiles, communications, materials, etc) are merely looking for ways to streamline their core competencies in design and development. Engineers in these industries need to build on a platform that can guarantee longer-term stability and continuity over multiple generations of their products. Designers need to be able to iterate and evolve their designs over years without replacing their entire set of tools or relearning different methodologies for design and measurement.

Figure 4. Constellation of Technologies in OSs, Integrations, and Programming Languages

Long-term continuity has been a hallmark of the LabVIEW platform since its inception in 1986. First introduced on the Macintosh because it was the only platform that could deliver the graphics required for the LabVIEW graphical programming language, LabVIEW has navigated through the sea change of software, communications, and OS technologies over the past 20 years – always preserving the investment of the user’s code intact. The LabVIEW multiplatform philosophy is to provide a common foundation upon which users can build solutions and easily run them on different OSs – Mac OS X, Windows, or UNIX (Linux). However, on each of these platforms, LabVIEW users can incorporate OS-specific technologies, such as ActiveX or .NET on Windows, to enhance their solutions. Following this approach, users can optimize their solutions in two dimensions – for full functionality on a particular OS or for maximum portability to ensure long-term preservation of their investment. By always supporting a mechanism for moving users through changing technologies, LabVIEW has managed to add new users along the way without alienating or abandoning users on specific technologies (see Figure 4). This is particularly important for scientists or engineers, who need to take advantage of the latest technologies without developing themselves into a corner.