At NIWEEK 2018 being held in Austin, Texas, National Instruments (NI) has released the 2018 edition of the LabVIEW, which engineers can use to address challenges and complexities of various trends that are set to take place in various industries. Over the years, NI's LabVIEW has led the industry in platform software for test workflows and enabled engineers to take advantage of new tools that simplify system integration and grant more control through hardware accessibility.

Industry trends such as 5G mobile network, Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), autonomous driving, among others, are innovations that are expected to bring complexities in the test and measurement sphere. NI said the challenge of testing these devices to ensure reliability, quality and safety introduce new demands and test configurations, with decreased time and budget.

With the 2018 edition of the LabVIEW, engineers will be able to address a multitude of these challenges and can be integrated with more third-party IP from tools like Python to make the most of the strengths of each package or existing IP from their stakeholders. Test engineers can use new functionality in LabVIEW 2018 to strengthen code reliability by automating the building and execution of software through integration with open interface tools like Jenkins for continuous delivery.

Capabilities like this empower test engineers to focus on system integration and development where they can offer unique differentiation, rather than get bogged down in the semantics of how to use software tools or move IP from one to another. For test engineers using field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) for high-performance processing, new deep learning functions and improved floating-point operations can reduce time to market.

"NI's continued commitment to its software-centric platform accelerates my productivity so I can focus on the challenges that yield the highest ROIs," says Chris Cilino, LabVIEW Framework Architect at Cirrus Logic. "LabVIEW continues to minimize the effort of adding tests and code modifications to our validation framework, delivering a consistent process to maintain our software and incorporate the reuse of valuable IP without rewrites."

To meet demands like testing higher complexity device under tests and shorter timeframes, engineers need tools tailored to their needs that can efficiently use through their workflow, helping them to meet their exact application requirements. LabVIEW 2018 is the latest addition to NI's software-centric platform that features products tailored to needs within distinct stages of their workflow – products that have been adopted in whole or in part by more than 300,000 active users.

With InstrumentStudio providing an interactive multi-instrument experience, TestStand test management software handling overall execution and reporting and SystemLink managing assets and software deployments, this workflow improves the productivity of test and validation labs across many industries. Each piece of the workflow is also interoperable with third-party software to maximize code and IP reuse and draws on the LabVIEW Tools Network ecosystem of add-ons and tools for more application-specific requirements.