NI Circuit Design Community Blog
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bikeron
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New Models for Photovoltaic Cells in Multisim
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Henry_Lavery
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Automotive Application: Hall Effect Sensor in Multisim
- GarretF on: LabVIEW-Multisim Co-Simulation with Variants and Hierarchical Blocks (Part 2)
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Control_Dir
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Adding 3D Information in Ultiboard
PCB West 2010
With attendance at this year's PCB West conference and exhibition up 35%, there was certainly an energetic vibe on the exhibition floor last week (September 29th) in Santa Clara, California. Meeting the show's attendees and hearing about their designs is always a highlight for me, but I also had the opportunity to participate in a few sessions, including the PCB Designer's Roundtable which provided insight into some of the main issues currently facing the PCB industry. For those of you who were not able to attend this year's show, here's a quick run-down of some our activities.
We had three core demo stations at our booth, each with a focus on increasing productivity in circuit design and test:
1. Design Station: Here we showed how to use the Multisim and Ultiboard circuit simulation and layout software for design optimization and prototyping. We displayed some custom daughter cards that were created for CompactRIO and Single-Board RIO (programmable automation controllers) using reference designs available in Multisim. We also displayed a breakout board for an accelerometer that I created using Multisim and Ultiboard in conjunction with the Circuit Design Ecosystem (Sunstone Circuits for board fabrication, and Screaming Circuits for assembly). This breakout board acted as a Nintendo controller: we used a National Instruments DAQ and LabVIEW to interface the accelerometer to a Mario Kart game for session attendees to try out (more on this next week!).
2. Test Station: Here we demonstrated how Multisim could be automated using Test Stand (test management software). We ran an AC Analysis simulation of a bandpass filter in Multisim (to act as our benchmark), then compared the results of a real-world frequency sweep of the same band-pass filter circuit to see how far it deviated from our simulation (we used a digitizer within a PXI-chassis to acquire the data - then a bit of LabVIEW manipulation to determine the exact gain at each frequency). Fernando Dominguez (an applications engineer here at NI) created this demo, and also created a video demonstration, which I have embedded below.
3. Test-Drive Station: This is where attendees could try out the software for themselves. We also gave away evaluation CDs at this station (if you would like one, they are also available for download.)
