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 automated test equipment (ATE) customers. 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 it also reflects a fundamental shift as reconfigurable software takes center stage in future systems.

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 definition shares many properties with NI virtual instrumentation – a software-defined system in which 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. A recent report by Frost & Sullivan, a leading market research firm, stated, “Often, industry participants use the terms synthetic instrumentation (SI) and virtual instrumentation (VI) interchangeably. In reality, SI is a subset of VI.”

For the last 20 years, NI has been educating engineers and scientists on how a virtual instrumentation approach empowers you, the user, with the ability to create or define the specific instrument functionality you require. To help capture this idea, NI has used the slogan, “The Software is the Instrument.” Twenty years ago, some people thought NI was a little crazy in its approach (especially considering that the personal computing platforms of the time were either a PC running DOS or an Apple Mac Plus). Regardless, this software-based approach has continued to grow while leveraging increasing technological advancements. Now, with the DOD and other customers mandating a software-based approach to instrumentation, it is quite clear that virtual instrumentation has become the accepted or mainstream approach to instrumentation. The winner from all of this is you. You benefit by achieving greater system flexibility and reconfigurability, which in turn increases performance capabilities while reducing cost.


John Graff
Vice President of Marketing

This article first appeared in the Q1 2007 issue of Instrumentation Newsletter.