National Instruments Expands HIL Simulation Platform to Optimize Embedded Control Systems

By DE Editors

National Instruments has announced the expansion of its hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) simulation platform, which includes products that optimize embedded system validation. During the past six months alone, NI has released nearly 40 new 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.

“We continually hear that engineers are struggling with traditional test systems to meet increasing product complexity and performance requirements within tight budgets and timelines,” said Mike Santori, business and technology fellow at National Instruments. “These engineers need an HIL simulation platform that is highly productive out of the box, but also open and flexible to adapt to fast-changing testing demands.”

Recent product releases include NI VeriStand software for real-time testing and simulation; the NI TestStand 4.2 automated test management environment including support for Python scripts; a new family of fault insertion units; NI-XNET high-performance CAN and FlexRay bus interfaces optimized for HIL applications; ARINC 429, MIL-STD-1553 and AFDX (ARINC 663) military and aerospace avionics bus interfaces; low-cost and high-performance real-time processor cards; and several other I/O interfaces.

To ensure that applications can easily 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 seamlessly with the NI LabVIEW graphical system design environment, the platform works with a variety of modeling environments such as The MathWorks, Inc.’s Simulink software, ITI’s SimulationX, Maplesoft’s MapleSim, and Gamma Technologies’ GT-POWER.

For more information, visit National Instruments.

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company's website.