It’s a milestone 20th year for NI Week and they still manage to pump out amazing collaborative solutions and new cutting edge products. The warm up to the event had lots of high-energy music reverberating around the hall, announcements of events to come, and a huge screen chock-full of a rolling Twitter feed. You could see from the tweets that many attendees were excited and couldn’t wait for the events to begin.
There were many new products announcements and here are some to give you a taste of what it was like when they announced them.
The Semiconductor Test System (STS) is a PXI-based automated test systems that NI says reduces test cost especially for RF and mixed-signal devices by opening access to NI- and industry-offered PXI modules in semiconductor production test environments. It features a customizable operator interface, handler/prober integration, device-centric programming with pin-channel mapping, standard test data format reporting and integrated multisite support.
The National Instruments Semiconductor Test System (STS)
The CompactRIO performance controller is a software-designed controller that integrates the latest embedded technologies from Intel and is supported by LabVIEW 2014 and NI Linux Real-Time. It suits advanced control and applications in harsh, industrial environments and provides high-performance processing, custom timing and triggering, and data transfer from modular C Series I/O. What makes this impressive is that it uses off-the-shelf devices that are also best in class. It includes the latest Intel Atom processor, the Kintex-7 FPGA, NI Linux Real Time OS, an Embedded UI, and USB3 or GigE vision cameras.
The company also introduced some software-designed instruments including a 14-bit, 250 MS/s 300 MHz, 8-channel oscilloscope, a 26. Ghz RF vector signal analyzer, a 12-bit, 2 GS/s 2GHz frequency digitizer, and a 12.5 Gb/s, with 8TX, 8RX lines, high-speed serial instrument.
These were only the product announcements and NI Week is so much more than that. They gave many amazing technology demos, gave awards for engineering impact, presented keynote speeches, offered discussion panels, and gave paper presentations. But, what struck me as I walked around the Austin Convention Center hallways, was that there were meetings going on in every available space in large and small groups, and there was business collaborations being conducted that probably wouldn’t happen without this event. Everyone there may not be an NI partner but they need to be here because, well, NI has global authority, and can’t they be ignored. That’s a pretty good 20th NI Week birthday present.
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