LabVIEW 2011 features more libraries and greater versatility

Jeff Kodosky, National Instruments Business and Technology Fellow, Cofounder and inventor of LabVIEW, states: "Twenty-five years ago, we created LabVIEW to help engineers focus on innovating instead of wrestling with complicated programming and system integration issues, and today, it has become the ultimate system design software for measurement and control. With each new version, whether by ensuring integration with the latest hardware, introducing new libraries and APIs or implementing engineer-requested features, our primary objective remains to increase productivity in any engineering situation."

LabVIEW 2011 makes it possible for engineers to achieve significant productivity gains in a variety of tasks, including the following time-saving functions:

• Quickly develop visually striking, contemporary user interfaces with a new Silver palette of controls and indicators
• Reuse code with support for the latest .NET assemblies, .m structures and new Xilinx IP for the LabVIEW FPGA Module
• Achieve up to five-times faster loading, wiring, editing and compiling of FPGA code
• Programmatically build and distribute executables to targets
• Spawn asynchronous threads to create multithreaded applications more quickly with a new communication API

Mission-critical applications

With its stability for mission-critical applications - such as those in the fields of military, aerospace, medical, industrial, structural health and large-scale physics research - as well as its simplified integration with hardware from many industry leaders, LabVIEW 2011 gives designers of measurement and control systems the confidence to innovate efficiently within a proven support infrastructure.

Speaking at the UK and Ireland launch of LabVIEW 2011, Kyle Voosen, the Director of Marketing, described it as the most stable version of LabVIEW ever released. One of the reasons for this greatly improved stability is that the new software has undergone far more testing, both automated and manual, on various operating systems.

Glenn Larkin, an engineer for the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, home of advanced fusion research and one of the world's most powerful lasers, comments: "By using LabVIEW, we decreased our system development time by one-third compared to the time we spent with traditional approaches. We plan to extend our use of LabVIEW and NI hardware in many facilities that support NIF so we can realise these same productivity gains in future projects."

When combined with modular hardware, LabVIEW 2011 is the centrepiece of the NI approach to graphical system design, which provides a unified platform for designing, prototyping and deploying applications with maximum efficiency. Engineers and scientists in virtually every industry are using graphical system design, from basic measurement applications to the most complex, advanced research projects. To learn more about how LabVIEW 2011 can accelerate productivity, go to www.ni.com/labview.