Jeff Kodosky, co-founder of National Instruments , recently spoke to EDN Asia about the progress of LabVIEW dataflow visual pro-gramming language and environment. Excerpts.
How much has LabVIEW evolved over the last 20 years?
Jeff Kodosky: When we started, our objective was to make a software environment that automates measurements easier, but we discovered that we had a technology that was more general. After the first release, people from a wide variety of areas saw a vision of what they can do with LabVIEW, and that really opened our eyes. So we kept adding capabilities as fast as we could. It took us at least four years to get to a compiled version which met performance needs. And it took us 10 to 15 years to implement all the things that were in the first round of visions that were inspired by our initial customers. Now we are embarking on our next initiative in saying that we can unify the design prototyping, deployment and testing markets with the same graphical user interface and programming technology, and maps across a wide variety of targets.
J.K: That’s easy— LabVIEW FPGA. To be able to draw a diagram on the screen and have it transformed into hardware circuit, running deterministically and reliably with no operating system and no drivers is like magic! And we’re just seeing the tip of the iceberg. There’s a lot more we can do with “visioning” to make it even easier and more general-purpose to map diagrams to circuits.
How important is graphical system design today?
J.K: We are visual creatures. We can interpret and understand things visually much better than we can read text. I think it’s becoming to a greater awareness that graphical user interface on computers makes a big difference in productivity and design work.
What has carried the product’s success for two decades?
J.K: It involves a number of different things at different levels. The graphics really do provide greater productivity that drive innovation in different markets. They still inspire people to want to try things that haven’t been done before. Another way of looking at it is that the foundation was so well done that we’ve been able to build on it and extend it for two decades without breaking the fundamental concept. I’m convinced more than ever that structured parallel data flow is a powerful model of computation that is more versatile than any program we’ve had.
How big is the team developing LabVIEW today?
J.K: For the core team, we were 10 people developing Version 1 initially. I’m not even sure what the number is now but it’s a whole floor of the company and then some. Plus we’ve got algorithms and mathematical signals being done in Shanghai, China. We’ve got test building and test programming going on in India. We’ve got research programming in wireless protocol platforms going on in Romania. We’ve got signal processing analysis going on in Denmark, Germany, Canada and California.
How important is Asia as a market for National Instruments?
J.K: Our sales are slightly more than 50 percent internationally, and probably in the international portion, Asia represents somewhere around one-third and will be approaching half. It’s an important market for us to grow in.
