EI8002 Virtual Instrumentation

Hardware's Role in Virtual Instrumentation

1. What are capabilities of virtual instrumentation hardware?

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 1. Compare virtual instrumentation hardware over time to traditional instrumentation.

2. On which hardware I/O and platforms does virtual instrumentation software run?

National Instruments modular I/O covers diverse I/O types so that engineers and
scientists can select I/O across many categories including analog, digital, counter/timer,
image, and motion. Modular I/O also includes modular instruments such as oscilloscopes,
meters, arbitrary function generators, LCR meters, and more. With the wide variety of
excellent I/O, engineers can randomly select any I/O type required by the application. Careful
engineering ensures that these diverse I/O types work seamlessly together, meaning they can
efficiently share backplane and timing resources.

Standard hardware platforms that house the I/O are important to I/O modularity.
Laptop and desktop computers provide an excellent platform where virtual instrumentation
can make the most of existing standards such as the USB, PCI, Ethernet, and PCMCIA buses.

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EI8002 Virtual Instrumentation

Using these standard buses, National Instruments can focus on measurement hardware
innovation while benefiting from inevitable PC platform innovation (for example, USB 2.0
and PCI Express).

Figure 2. Modular I/O and scalable platforms such as USB, PCI, and PXI provide flexibility
and scalability.

In addition to supporting standard platforms, National Instruments is part of a 65-vendor

consortium that has helped tailor the PXI hardware platform for virtual instrumentation. PXI
is a standard for modular I/O built on PC technologies. It adds integrated timing and
synchronization, industrial ruggedness, and increased channel count to a PC-based
architecture. Today, there are more than 1000 products created for the PXI platform being
used worldwide by thousands of companies.

Choosing the appropriate platform on which to create virtual instrumentation on

depends on specific application requirements. For example, portability, stringent
synchronization, and acquisition rates all play a role in choosing a platform.

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EI8002 Virtual Instrumentation

Table 1. National Instruments Hardware Platform Comparison

3. How will new bus technologies such as USB 2.0 and PCI Express enhance virtual
instrumentation?

Virtual instrumentation uses advances in commercially available computer

technologies to make faster and higher-performance measurements at lower cost than
traditional instruments. One example of this is with PC data buses. While instrument
communication interfaces such as serial and GPIB have remained virtually unchanged for
decades, new PC buses provide dramatic improvements in bandwidth and ease of use. Since
the mid-1960s, PC processing power has, according to Moore’s Law, approximately doubled
every 18 months. Now, data buses such as PCI Express and USB 2.0 are making similar leaps
in speed. Good virtual instrumentation software takes advantage of these new technologies
while minimizing the impact on the application.

The 132 MB/s bandwidth provided by the 32-bit, 33MHz PCI bus still present on
most desktop PCs was a good match for plug-in peripherals 10 years ago, but now can be
monopolized by a single device, such as a Serial-ATA drive. And Gigabit LAN cards – at
1000 Mb/s – use approximately 95 percent of available PCI bandwidth. PCI bus architecture
requires it to share the available 132 MB/s with all devices on the bus, so high-bandwidth
devices such as Serial-ATA drives and Gigabit LAN cards strangle other devices on the PCI
bus. To remedy these limitations, a new peripheral bus called PCI Express has recently
started to appear in new PCs. PCI Express maintains software compatibility with PCI, but
replaces the physical bus with a high-speed (2.5 Gb/s) serial bus. Data is sent in packets
through transmit and receive signal pairs called lanes with about 200 MB/s bandwidth per
direction, per lane. Multiple lanes can be grouped together into x1 (“by-one”), x2, x4, and x8
lane widths. Unlike PCI, which shares bandwidth between all devices on the bus, this
bandwidth is provided to each device in the system. PCI Express benefits for virtual
instrumentation are obvious. Plug-in devices such as data acquisition devices and frame

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EI8002 Virtual Instrumentation

grabbers can use the increased bandwidth for faster acquisitions and higher throughputs, and
multiple system devices benefit from guaranteed bandwidth availability.

Figure 3. The Evolution of PC Bus Technologies

USB 2.0, now standard on all new desktop and laptop PCs, also offers significant
benefits to virtual instrumentation. Initially created to connect peripherals such as keyboards
and mice to the PC, USB has quickly become the ubiquitous standard for sending data to and
from the PC and electronic devices, including digital cameras, MP3 players, and even data
acquisition devices. The USB plug-and-play nature makes usability and device portability
extremely simple. The PC automatically detects when a new device has been plugged in,
queries for device identification, and appropriately configures the required drivers. In
addition, USB is hot-pluggable, so, unlike other data buses, there is no need to power down
the PC before adding or removing a device. The high speed of USB 2.0 improves data
throughput by 40X compared to USB 1.1, increasing bandwidth to 480 Mb/s.

All new PCs come with USB 2.0 ports, and PCI Express is emerging as the new plug-
in bus standard. As Intel, Dell, HP, and other vendors continue to develop systems and
components based on these technologies, economies of scale continue to improve
performance and costs. Virtual instrumentation and National Instruments products will
continue to use these bus technology advances to provide higher speed test and measurements
products at even lower prices.

4. What are the benefits of Ethernet for virtual instrumentation?

Virtual instrumentation systems frequently use Ethernet for remote test system
control, distributed I/O, and enterprise data sharing. The primary benefit in using Ethernet is
cost. In nearly all cases, the Ethernet network preceded the measurement system, so it often
adds little cost to the measurement system itself. Ethernet provides a low-cost, moderate-
throughput method for exchanging data and control commands over distances. However, due

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EI8002 Virtual Instrumentation

to its packet-based architecture, Ethernet is not deterministic and has relatively high latency.
For some applications, such as instrumentation systems, the lack of determinism and high
latency make Ethernet a poor choice for integrating adjacent I/O modules. These situations
are better served with a dedicated bus such as PXI, VXI, or GPIB.

Often, a virtual instrumentation system uses other buses in conjunction with Ethernet.
Typically, a network node consists of modular I/O clusters. Each cluster uses a high-speed,
low-latency bus to exchange data between different I/O modules. To communicate with
neighboring nodes, transfer data to a remote location, or accept commands from a remote
location, the network nodes use the Ethernet network.

Figure 4. Example of Ethernet/LAN based virtual instrumentation system

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