NI LabVIEW 8.5 improves test throughput with multicore and FPGA technologies

National Instruments’ LabVIEW 8.5 is the latest version of the graphical system design platform for test, control and embedded system development. Building on nearly 10 years of investment in multithreading technology, LabVIEW 8.5 simplifies multicore and FPGA development for high-performance test applications with its intuitive parallel dataflow language. As manufacturers shift to multicore processors to provide performance gains, LabVIEW 8.5 running on these new processors can deliver more powerful systems with increased test throughput. The latest version of LabVIEW offers performance gains with automatic thread scaling based on the total available number of processing cores, improved thread-safe drivers and deterministic real-time multithreading for high-performance test applications such as those in wireless, high-speed digital and mixed-signal test.

Using LabVIEW 8.5 to program multicore systems, test engineers now can design new production testers with increased test throughput by performing parallel operations such as data acquisition, generation and analysis on multiple processor cores. With the inherent parallelism of the LabVIEW dataflow language and built-in multithreading, engineers can build advanced systems that balance the workload among available processing cores. Because of the simplified graphical approach to multithreading in LabVIEW, engineers already using LabVIEW also can take advantage of multicore technology to achieve performance gains for their existing test systems with little to no change to their applications. Additionally, test engineers can further optimize their test systems by distributing processing to an FPGA target using the LabVIEW FPGA Module.

LabVIEW 8.5 running on multicore processors also can solve high-speed data streaming application challenges such as communications IC verification, high-definition video display testing and RF spectral monitoring by distributing the measurement I/O and the file I/O to separate processing cores. Using LabVIEW 8.5 and high-speed bus technology such as PCI Express, engineers can stream data continuously at rates up to 2.5 GB/s to system memory.

National Instruments, www.ni.com