NI beefs up LabVIEW

The latest version combines LabVIEW’s graphical programming environment with commercial multicore hardware to allows designers to achieve ‘significant’ performance gains. Additionally, LabVIEW 8.5 introduces the LabVIEW Statechart Module, allowing for higher level designs to run on targets such as fpgas, real time systems, touch panels and a range of microprocessors. “Programming embedded multicore systems is very difficult with conventional tools,” said NI president and founder Dr James Truchard. “The ability to program real time multicore hardware with LabVIEW 8.5 represents a technology breakthrough for embedded developers. The new multicore support and the programming model delivered by the statechart module in LabVIEW 8.5 will meet embedded design needs for years to come.” New in version 8.5 is the LabVIEW Statechart Module. According to NI, this allows engineers to design systems using a high level diagram based on the Unified Modelling Language standard. Embedded developers can use the Statechart Module to design software combined with real world I/O running on deterministic real time or fpga based hardware with high level statechart notations. Meanwhile, debugging and code optimisation are addressed by the Real Time Execution Trace Toolkit 2.0. This displays timing relationships between sections of code and the individual threads and processing cores where the code is executing. LabVIEW 8.5 boasts an FPGA Project Wizard that automates I/O configuration, IP development and overall setup for common I/O counter, timer and encoder applications. Using the FPGA Project Wizard and its automatic code generation, engineers and scientists easily can add DMA for high speed data transfer. NI has also added a simplified I/O programming interface to the LabVIEW Embedded Module for ADI Blackfin Processors 2.0, making analogue and digital I/O easier. Also, the LabVIEW Microprocessor SDK 2.5 now includes Freescale ColdFire in its list of compatible platforms.