Graphical System Design Meets Angry Birds: NIWeek Day 1 Keynote Recap

[Dave Brown]

The first keynote event of NIWeek 2011 represented a veritable Chex Mix of fun for technophiles. From a crash course on the history of measurement technologies to the future of LTE communications and everything in between, no matter what industry you represent, there was something in the event for everyone to get their fix.

NI president, CEO, and cofounder Dr. Truchard opened the day by explaining how, when he entered the industry in the early sixties, general purpose analog instrumentation was king of innovation – and had been since the 1920s. The sensitivity and cost of those instruments, among other drawbacks, kept the process of invention and deployment at a snail’s pace compared to today. Then came the era of transistors and ICs, which started a continually accelerating trend of efficiency gains and miniaturization that carried engineering through the next 45 years, until now. Truchard then summarized how we are now in the era of graphical system design, where software, not instrumentation, takes center stage. How engineers can now reach new levels of productivity by using LabVIEW system design software as the tool that pulls together instrumentation of any type, for any application.

Following Truchard was Eric Starkloff, NI VP of test and industrial embedded marketing, who hosted several teams of NI engineers and customers who demonstrated all sorts of productivity gains achieved with NI products. The demonstrations included many new NI products, including the following:

• NI VeriStand 2011 for real-time test, demonstrated in an avionics solution
• The first multicore NI CompactRIO and one-slot Single-Board RIO, seen in evolving smart-grid technologies
• The industry’s highest-performing 14 GHz RF PXI Vector Signal Analyzer, outperforming the Agilent PXA in head-to-head RF test combat
• Multiple new products for semiconductor test, including new SMU and PPMU tools
• Wireless CompactDAQ and other cDAQ devices, used to create an NI version of the popular Angry Birds video game – Angry Eagles. (Complete with a giant slingshot device on stage.)
• LabVIEW 2011, of course, the heart of the NI approach to graphical system design

Starkloff and his team unveiled these and many other products as well as teasing the audience with talk and demos of some forthcoming NI innovations. It was a great opening to NIWeek 2011. And if today was any indication of what the rest of the week holds, we’re all in for an exciting time.

To get detailed information about the new products unveiled today, visit www.ni.com/day1.