Virtual Instrumentation and Traditional Instruments

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Visión General

With more than 6 million new measurement channels sold last year, National Instruments is a
worldwide leader in virtual instrumentation. Engineers have used virtual instrumentation for more than
25 years to bring the power of flexible software and PC technology to test, control, and design
applications making accurate analog and digital measurements from DC to 2.7 GHz. This document
discusses both the compatibility and differences between virtual instrumentation and traditional
instruments.

Contenido

1. What is a virtual instrument and how is it different from a traditional instrument?

2. How do virtual instrumentation hardware capabilities compare to traditional instrumentation?
3. Are virtual instruments and traditional instruments compatible?
4. How are virtual instruments and synthetic instruments different?
5. Additional Virtual Instrumentation Resources

What is a virtual instrument and how is it different from a

traditional instrument?
Virtual instruments are defined by the user while traditional instruments have fixed, vendor-defined
functionality.

Figure 1. Traditional instruments (left) and software based virtual instruments (right) largely share the
same architectural components, but radically different philosophies

Every virtual instrument consists of two parts – software and hardware. A virtual instrument typically
has a sticker price comparable to and many times less than a similar traditional instrument for the
current measurement task. However, the savings compound over time, because virtual instruments are
much more flexible when changing measurement tasks.

By not using vendor-defined, prepackaged software and hardware, engineers and scientists get
maximum user-defined flexibility. A traditional instrument provides them with all software and
measurement circuitry packaged into a product with a finite list of fixed-functionality using the
instrument front panel. A virtual instrument provides all the software and hardware needed to
accomplish the measurement or control task. In addition, with a virtual instrument, engineers and
scientists can customize the acquisition, analysis, storage, sharing, and presentation functionality using
productive, powerful software.

Here are some examples of this flexibility in practice:

1. One Application -- Different Devices
For this particular example, an engineer is developing an application using LabVIEW and an M
Series DAQ board on a desktop computer PCI bus in his lab to create a DC voltage and
temperature measurement application. After completing the system, he needs to deploy the
application to a PXI system on the manufacturing floor to perform the test on new product.
Alternatively, he may need the application to be portable, and so he selects NI USB DAQ
products for the task. In this example, regardless of the choice, he can use virtual
instrumentation in a single program in all three cases with no code change needed.

Figure 2. Upgrading hardware is easy when using the same application for many devices.

2. Many Applications, One Device

Consider another engineer, who has just completed a project using her new M Series DAQ
device and quadrature encoders to measure motor position. Her next project is to monitor and
log the power drawn by the same motor. She can reuse the same M Series DAQ device even
though the task is significantly different. All she has to do is develop the new application using
virtual instrumentation software. Additionally, both projects could be combined into a single
application and run on a single M Series DAQ device, if needed.
 Figure 3. Reduce costs by reusing hardware for many applications.

How do virtual instrumentation hardware capabilities compare

to traditional instrumentation?

An important concept of virtual instrumentation is the strategy that powers the actual virtual
instrumentation software and hardware device acceleration. National Instruments focuses on adapting
or using high-investment technologies of companies such as Microsoft, Intel, Analog Devices, Xilinx,
and others. With software, National Instruments uses the tremendous Microsoft investment in OSs and
development tools. For hardware, National Instruments builds on the Analog Devices investment in
A/D converters.

Fundamentally, because virtual instrumentation is software-based, if you can digitize it, you can
measure it. Therefore, measurement hardware can be viewed on two axes, resolutions (bits) and
frequency. Refer to the figure below to see how measurement capabilities of virtual instrumentation
hardware compare to traditional instrumentation. The goal for National Instruments is to push the curve
out in frequency and resolution and to innovate within the curve.
 Figure 4. Compare virtual instrumentation hardware over time to traditional instrumentation.

Are virtual instruments and traditional instruments compatible?

Many engineers and scientists have a combination of both virtual and traditional instruments in their
labs. In addition, some traditional instruments provide a specialized measurement which the engineer
or scientist would prefer to have the vendor define rather than actually defining it themselves. This
begs the question, “Are virtual instruments and traditional instruments compatible?”

Virtual instruments are compatible with traditional instruments almost without exception. Virtual
instrumentation software typically provides libraries for interfacing with common ordinary instrument
buses such as GPIB, serial, or Ethernet.

In addition to providing libraries, more than 200 instrument vendors have contributed more than 4,000
instrument drivers to National Instruments Instrument Driver Library. Instrument drivers provide a set
of high-level, human-readable functions for interfacing with instruments. Each instrument driver is
specifically tailored to a particular model of instrument to provide an interface to its unique
capabilities.

To find an instrument driver or learn how to create one for an instrument, visit ni.com/idnet.

How are virtual instruments and synthetic instruments

different?

A fundamental trend in the automated test industry is a heavy shift toward software-based test systems.
For example, the United States Department of Defense (DoD) is one of the world’s largest customers of
automated test equipment (ATE). In order to reduce the cost of ownership of test systems and increase
reuse, the DoD, through the Navy’s NxTest program, has specified that future ATE use an architecture
built on modular hardware and reconfigurable software called synthetic instrumentation. The adoption
of synthetic instrumentation represents a significant development in the specification of future Military
ATE systems, and reflects a fundamental shift as reconfigurable software takes center-stage in future
systems. Successful implementation of software-based test systems, such as synthetic instrumentation,
requires an understanding of the hardware platforms and software tools in the market, as well as an
understanding of the distinction between system-level architectures and instrument-level architectures.

The Synthetic Instrument Working Group defines synthetic instruments as “a reconfigurable system
that links a series of elemental hardware and software components with standardized interfaces to
generate signals or make measurements using numeric processing techniques”. This shares many
properties with virtual instrumentation, which is “a software-defined system, where software based on
user requirements defines the functionality of generic measurement hardware”. Both definitions share
the common properties of software-defined instrumentation running on commercial hardware. By
moving the measurement functionality into user-accessible reconfigurable hardware, those adopting
such architectures benefit by achieving greater flexibility and reconfigurability of systems, which in
turn increases performance capabilities while reducing cost.

Additional Virtual Instrumentation Resources

To learn more about virtual instrumentation, use the following resources:

• About Virtual Instrumentation

• Virtual Instrumentation versus Traditional Instruments
• Virtual Instrumentation for Test, Control, and Design
• Software's Role in Virtual Instrumentation
• Hardware's Role in Virtual Instrumentation