This week Electronics Weekly talks to a leading industry figure: Dr James Truchard, president of National Instruments.

How has PC technology changed the role of the test and design engineer?

PC technology has created a big cost/performance advantage for the user. Typically instruments are redesigned once in five years but the PC gets a new life every 90 days. The resulting performance increase means the user gets faster processing for free. What this means for the test engineer is faster throughput of measurements which gives them a competitive advantage.

With the growing importance of PC and software-based instruments will there be any standalone test instruments in five years?

Yes, definitely. Oscilloscopes are the least vulnerable (to this trend). But when you look at automated test architectures with multiple instruments the rules change. The key thing is that the software must not be limited by the hardware. A benefit of the software-based approach is that you don’t have performance bottlenecks because the hardware was designed first and the software later. The real point is you get user-defined instrumentation instead of vendor-defined instrumentation.   

So is National Instruments becoming primarily a software company?

No, both hardware and software capabilities are equally important to us. We decided to have a common hardware and software position in the marketplace. We address the fundamental capabilities, by focusing on the hardware without worrying too much about the overall function and then we let the software do the rest. For example, you can use off-the-shelf components, such as state-of-the-art analogue to digital converters, and then design the hardware architecture to make the most of them.

How important is the convergence of test and design to the company?

It is a paradigm shift, but a constructive one. We have always had customers who used LabView for design, so there was an early indication that it had implications beyond the test and measurement space. So over the last five years we have just added elements to the technology, such as real-time, FPGA and multi-core, to support the design capability.

How important is the convergence of test and design to the user?

The customer does not like to learn how to use too many tools so there can be benefits to having common technology and software between design and test. For the start-up it can mean getting a design completed in three months rather than two years. Anyone not doing this will be at a competitive disadvantage. We see start-ups working in bio-medical, nanotechnology and MEMS adopting a single tool approach.