NI boosts hardware-in-the-loop simulation platform
A National Instruments product story
Edited by the Electronicstalk editorial team Nov 20, 2009
National Instruments (NI) has announced the expansion of its hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) simulation platform, which includes various products that are said to optimise embedded system validation.
During the past six months, the company has released nearly 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 helps engineers maintain reliability and time-to-market requirements while reducing costs, even as their products become more complex.
Mike Santori, business and technology fellow at NI, said: 'We continually hear that engineers are struggling with traditional test systems to meet increasing product complexity and performance requirements within tight budgets and timelines.
'These engineers need a HIL simulation platform that is highly productive out of the box but also open and flexible to adapt to fast-changing testing demands.
'The platform's highly flexible architecture helps engineers address a wide range of applications, from those in automotive and aerospace to new fields such as alternative energy and medical device development,' he added.
Recent product releases include: the 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 real-time processor cards; and several other input/output 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 Mathworks' Simulink software, ITI's SimulationX; Maplesoft's Maplesim and Gamma Technologies' GT-Power.
Engineers can increase their system performance and flexibility while reducing overall costs by taking advantage of the open PXI hardware standard, advanced multi-core technology and graphically programmed field-programmable gate array 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 multi-processor distributed simulators.
This is said to provide engineers with a flexible and cost-effective toolset for all HIL testing applications.
The platform delivers commercial off-the-shelf solutions that offer alternatives to complex proprietary configurations and bulky, inefficient traditional simulation systems.
NI HIL simulation products are suitable for making projects more efficient for design engineers in a variety industries, such as aerospace, alternative energy, automotive, consumer electronics, government, industrial transportation, mechatronics, medical technology and semiconductor manufacturing.
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