NI boosts hardware-in-the-loop simulation platform

National Instruments (NI) has announced the expansion of its hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) simulation platform, which includes various products that are said to optimise embedded-system validation.

During the past six months, the company has released nearly 40 products targeted at delivering flexible HIL solutions to embedded control system developers within a variety of industries.The portfolio of NI HIL simulation tools helps engineers maintain reliability and time-to-market requirements while reducing costs, even as their products become more complex.

Mike Santori, business and technology fellow at NI, said: 'We continually hear that engineers are struggling with traditional test systems to meet increasing product complexity and performance requirements within tight budgets and timelines.

'These engineers need a HIL simulation platform that is highly productive out of the box but also open and flexible to adapt to fast-changing testing demands.

'The platform's highly flexible architecture helps engineers address a wide range of applications, from those in automotive and aerospace to new fields such as alternative energy and medical device development,' he added.

Recent product releases include: the NI Veristand software for real-time testing and simulation; the NI Teststand 4.2 automated test management environment including support for Python scripts; a range of fault insertion units; NI-XNET high-performance CAN and Flexray bus interfaces optimised for HIL applications; Arinc 429, MIL-STD-1553 and AFDX (Arinc 663) military and aerospace avionics bus interfaces; low-cost real-time processor cards; and several other input/output interfaces.

To ensure that applications can scale and meet evolving requirements, the NI HIL simulation platform supports third-party hardware interfaces and integrates with C, C++, .Net and Python programming languages.

In addition to integrating with the NI Labview graphical system design environment, the platform works with a variety of modelling environments such as Mathworks' Simulink software, ITI's SimulationX; Maplesoft's Maplesim and Gamma Technologies' GT-Power.

Engineers can increase their system performance and flexibility while reducing overall costs by taking advantage of the open PXI hardware standard, advanced multi-core technology and graphically programmed field-programmable gate array interfaces.

The platform's software-defined instrumentation approach makes it possible for HIL applications created with NI products to scale from low-cost desktop validation systems to multi-processor distributed simulators.

This is said to provide engineers with a flexible and cost-effective toolset for all HIL testing applications.

The platform delivers commercial off-the-shelf solutions that offer alternatives to complex proprietary configurations and bulky, inefficient traditional simulation systems.

NI HIL simulation products are suitable for making projects more efficient for design engineers in a variety industries, such as aerospace, alternative energy, automotive, consumer electronics, government, industrial transportation, mechatronics, medical technology and semiconductor manufacturing.

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