xix

Preface to the Second Edition

Contents

xix

17
Foreword
It is indeed an honor to write the foreword for the second edition of this landmark book on Virtual
Instrumentation using LabVIEW. When I wrote the foreword to the rst edition of this book in 2005, LabVlEW
was growing fast in India with widespread adoption by industries, research institutions, and academia, for
data acquisition, signal analysis, control, and presentation. In less than ve years, LabVIEW has become
the dominant programming-language-of-choice for Measurement and Automation. The power of LabVIEW
has grown from strength to strength by leveraging the latest developments in software and communication
technologies, like distributed computing. But the most interesting fact is that the Graphical Programming
paradigm in LabVIEW, which automatically took advantage of a parallel computing architecture, is looking
extremely prescient with the advent of multicore microprocessors in computers and FPGAs, in embedded
systems. LabVIEW already runs on all such computing platforms and its importance is certain to grow
exponentially in the coming years. This book will enable everybody, from beginners to seasoned practitioners,
to take advantage of this coming revolution.
Dr Sanjay Gupta and Dr Joseph John had set a Virtual Instrumentation milestone in India with the release
of the rst edition in 2005. With the release of their updated second edition, they have clearly established the
success of their endeavor. Virtual Instrumentation, for a long time had remained the domain of researchers
at the premier educational and research institutions in India. With the advent of liberalization in the 90s,
India became one of the fastest growing economies in the world, and Indian industries started to benchmark
themselves against global standards of quality and productivity. This resulted in the adoption of Virtual
Instrumentation in the Indian industry which clearly recognized the need to replace manual sample testing
with automated inline testing. Virtual Instrumentation began moving beyond the proverbial ivory towers
into widespread deployment.
But it was not until 1998, when National Instruments set up their ofce in Bangalore, that Virtual
Instrumentation really started to come into its own in India. Since then, Virtual Instrumentation has seen
astonishing growth, catalyzed by National Instruments training initiatives in academia and industry. The rst
Virtual Instrumentation laboratory in India was set up by National Instruments at IIT Kanpur in 1999 under
the stewardship of the authors who were by that time already long-time users of Virtual Instrumentation and
LabVIEW. Through conferences and seminars, the authors, have, over the years, done much to demystify
Virtual Instrumentation for those who wanted a general understanding of this technologys capabilities
and applications while also conducting rigorous training programs for those who wanted to gain in-depth

xx

Contents
Foreword

knowledge and develop usable skills in this area. The rst academic course in Virtual Instrumentation and
LabVIEW was developed by the authors and given at IIT Kanpur. The largest Virtual Instrumentation project
done by an academic institution in India was executed by Dr Sanjay Gupta and his colleague Dr Kamal
Poddar at IIT Kanpur, along with their students and research associates. This Virtual Instrumentation project,
implemented at the National Wind Tunnel Facility, received international acclaim at NIWeek, the worldwide
conference on Virtual Instrumentation, by winning the Best Application Award in the category of Aerospace
and Defence in 2000.
It is extremely heartening that the acknowledged experts in the eld, who have been long-time users and
very active promoters of Virtual Instrumentation in India, are releasing the second edition of their popular
book. It is sure to make Virtual Instrumentation and LabVIEW much more accessible to the beginners while
also providing new insights to the seasoned practitioners who can learn from the experience of the authors
and their wide interactions with the experts in this eld.
Written in an extremely pedagogical style, Virtual Instrumentation Using LabVIEW: Principles and
Practices of Graphical Programming 2e, contains details which come from the authors own extensive
experience in developing Virtual Instrumentation systems to address challenging real-world applications.
This comprehensive book covers the latest developments in Virtual Instrumentation and LabVIEW, and
includes excellent chapters on essential concepts like State Machines and Data Acquisition. They have also
shared in the book their unique experience of developing the Virtual Instrumentation and LabVIEW course
at IIT Kanpur which will be very useful for educationalists as LabVIEW spreads throughout the engineering
and science colleges of India. In closing, this book is an important addition to the literature in Virtual
Instrumentation and LabVIEW and will go a long way in further promoting this important eld in India.
DR GANESH DEVARAJ
Managing Director & CEO
Soliton Technologies
Bangalore