After 50 years of instrumentation development, is it time for a rethink?

Kyle Voosen, director of marketing at National Instruments (NI) UK, believes the test and measurement industry will inevitably have to adapt to meet this trend. "When you look at the test and measurement industry, we have put 50 years' of innovation into box instrumentation. We have got faster, more accurate, more capable and added more features to our scopes. But it has certainly not changed to anything like an iPad." It is a trend that has run in parallel with NI's philosophy of virtual instrumentation – replacing buttons on instruments with the user's computer, running using software to define the instruments and tests. So it is, perhaps, no surprise that it has come up with a product – called VirtualBench – that 'fills this innovation gap' and reflects where the rest of the world is going. "It designed to work with your PC or an iPad in a fashion that allows you to gesture or interact, rather than hit buttons or instruments," said Voosen. Moreover, unlike most NI solutions, it is aimed squarely at design characterisation rather than automated tests. Voosen confirmed: "It is made for the benchtop, not the 19inch rack." VirtualBench combines five instruments in one: DMM; mixed signal scope; power supply; function generator; and digital I/O. It is not modular, neither is it available in different specifications (at the moment). Instead, it is a set suite of instruments. Voosen said: "We are not breaking any performance boundaries; it's the engineer's 'bread and butter' instrumentation in a single box. It's amazing what you can do when you don't need a screen, buttons and knobs. It is the same technology as we would use in some of our high end PXI products for data acquisition and instrumentation, but put in a form factor that is more interactive for a design engineer on a bench top." The objective was not to produce an instrument to replace a full lab, it was to have a piece of equipment that could do 90% of the measurements on a day to day basis and sit on the developer's desk, or even be taken out on the road. The resulting product achieves this, measuring 25.4 × 19.1 × 7.4cm. To put it another way, the top surface is about the size of an iPad and it is as high as a thick textbook. The components of VirtualBench are: a 100MHz mixed signal oscilloscope with two analogue and 34 digital channels; a 5½ digit digital multimeter; a function generator with a 20MHz bandwidth and one channel; a programmable DC power supply with three channels – +6V/1A, +25V/0.5A and -25V/0.5A; and the digital I/O has eight bidrectional channels. Such specifications should cover a multitude of use cases, NI believes, including one off tests and debug and characterisation of circuits or chips the designer is working on. Voosen gave Analog Devices in Ireland as an example of an early adopter. "When its people are out on the road, they want to visit their customers and make sure their products are working correctly. But they can't carry a lab's worth of equipment with them – now all they need is to take VirtualBench." Could there be more models in the range if customers started looking for more performance or capability? "I think you can assume that we are looking at those types of things," said Voosen. "We have come out initially with one that we think covers a large piece of what box instruments do. Of course, if we find sweet spots that require higher bandwidth or maybe faster acquisition, we have products in house that do that already, so it would be a matter of incorporating them. But we also wanted to hit a price point that was at least enough to start changing perceptions in the market place." That price point is around £1400. There are alternatives – other vendors have, Voosen claims, taken a scope and added other features to it, while there is always the option of buying the instruments individually, but these options can cost an order of magnitude more. The approach to this instrument development was to start with software – it is a software defined instrument. "It is software with which you interact first; the hardware basically enables you to bring the data into your computer or your tablet," said Voosen. "We would rather talk about the software interface as that is the way society is going – people don't use those buttons and knobs so much, they use their consumer electronics devices and talk with things that are plugged into them. This approach has been several years in the making and it turns out that, in that time, tablets have really taken off, so I think we have made the right bet." Although he did add: "Having said that, I really don't think the PC is going away anytime soon for the design engineer. Their EDA software doesn't run on iPads!" VirtualBench launches when plugged into a computer. All the necessary software is loaded on the device itself, so there is nothing to install. The interface, which is subtly different for the iPad to maximise use of the touch screen, allows all five instruments to be displayed on the same screen. "It is not a fast growing industry, but one that we think is in need of disruption," added Voosen. "It hasn't changed much in 50 years, the boxes and the labs haven't changed in 50 years. If you refitted your lab with the latest instruments, you would still have to get data out of that some way or other way - so screen shots or USB, GPIB whatever it is to plug your computer into. We have taken that one step further and are helping to liberate the instrument from the lab itself, to put it on the desktop, in your bag, on the road with you, with your laptop as part of the overall system. So, if you look at it that way, maybe our view is more future looking than just putting more than one instrument in a piece of metal and adding more buttons and knobs. Voosen concluded: "Obviously, we are not going to reinvent electronics design, but we are trying to approach designers at their desktop rather than in the lab or on the manufacturing floor."