The story of NI and its influence on instrument control

National Instruments, widely known as NI in the test and instrumentation worlds, will become the Test & Measurement unit in Emerson after the completion of the $8.2 billion acquisition. The St. Louis, Missouri-based industrial conglomerate is betting on NI’s software-connected automated test and measurement systems in its pursuit of becoming a major player in the global automation industry.

That ends NI’s 48-year-long journey that started in a garage in Austin, Texas. The company, which produces test, measurement, and control hardware and software for corporate and government organizations, announced a revenue of $1.6 billion in 2022. It operates in over 40 countries while serving nearly 35,000 customers in semiconductor and electronics, transportation, and aerospace and defense markets.

Figure 1 The test and measurement company ends its 48-year-long run after being acquired by Emerson. Source: National Instruments

Ritu Favre, who joined NI in 2019 as senior VP and GM of the semiconductor business and was promoted to executive VP of business units in 2022, will head the Test & Measurement segment within Emerson’s Software and Control group. And this group will continue to be headquartered in Austin, Texas.

However, with the deal completion, NI’s stock has ceased trading on the Nasdaq. That marks the end of the road for a company that pioneered computer-based test and measurement systems over a half-century.

Below is a sneak peek at how NI helped create flexible and modular system-level test solutions with an open and interoperable software platform. It also illustrates how these software-enabled automated test and measurement systems allowed companies to bring products to market faster and at a lower cost.

NI’s early history

Three researchers at the Applied Research Laboratories of the University of Texas at Austin got frustrated by the inefficient data collection tools used at the time while they were working on a U.S. Navy project exploring a sonar test system. While using mini-computers to process data from numerous instruments, James Truchard, Jeff Kodosky, and Bill Nowlin decided to create a more efficient product: a GPIB interface for a PDP11 computer.

GPIB, a general-purpose instrument bus developed by Hewlett-Packard to control lab instruments, offered higher performance and lower latency at the time. In 1976, the trio began to work on a GPIB-based test solution at Truchard’s garage. After considering several options, including Longhorn Instruments and Texas Digital, they finalized the name National Instruments for their new company.

Next year, while still employed by the University of Texas at Austin, they hired the first full-time employee, Kim Harrison-Hosen, to handle orders, billing, and customer inquiries. In 1978, they moved the company to an actual office at Burnet Road in Austin.

At lunchtime, they would cross the road to the new office to review customer service requests. Truchard joined the company as a full-time employee in 1979, and Kodosky and Nowlin followed him in 1980, the year National Instruments moved to a larger 5,000-square-feet office.

Figure 2 Bill Nowlin (seated), who passed away in October 2019, is seen with James Truchard, who remained at the helms at NI till 2017. Source: EDN

Then came the turning point for this small upstart. While contemplating a programming language for controlling test instruments over GPIB, the cofounders were inspired by two landmark developments in computing: Macintosh computer’s graphical user interface and the impact that spreadsheets made in the financial arena.

“We wanted to do for embedded what the PC did for the desktop,” Truchard said. In 1983, the company produced its first GPIB board to connect instruments to IBM PCs. “It was 1983 when we ported GPIB to the PC that volume took off,” he said. “It was also when I asked Jeff to come up with a way of automating the measurements. We wanted a programming language that would do for instrumentation what the spreadsheet had done for finance.”

Kodosky wanted to create a user-friendly graphical notation instead of text programming so that users could customize their virtual instruments. “I wanted to create a tool that would do for the test and measurement world what the spreadsheet did for financial analysis,” Truchard told EE Times in 2012, looking back on LabVIEW’s evolution. “Jeff, like any aspiring programmer, wanted to create a programming language. We both got our wish.”

Figure 3 Jeff Kodosky displays the first version of LabView, which premiered for Apple computers in 1986. Source: EDN

The advent of LabVIEW

In 1986, National Instruments introduced its first flagship product—LabVIEW graphical development platform—for the Macintosh computer. It made a significant impact across a wide range of industries, including electronics, energy, aerospace, automotive and academic research. “When we were doing I/O and data acquisition boards for the Mac, we had no competition,” said Truchard. “When we released it on PC, we took the world by storm. That was September 1992.”

Kodosky and Truchard, while challenging standard practices at the time, combined their skills and demonstrated resourcefulness to design a programming solution based on structured dataflow methods but with the unusual feature of having a graphical interface.

The two co-founders of National Instruments were honored with the Lifetime Achievement Award at the UBM Electronics ACE awards in 2012. They were also inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2019 for their role in developing LabVIEW graphical programming for engineers and scientists.

Figure 4 James Truchard (left), then CEO of National Instruments, and Jeff Kodosky (second from right), then business and technology Fellow at National Instruments, joined EE Times editors Junko Yoshida and Patrick Mannion after winning the ACE awards in 2012. Source: EE Times

LabVIEW, a system engineering software, allows engineers and scientists to develop sophisticated test, measurement, and control applications. It was first implemented in GPIB cards and then in data-acquisition cards. Eventually, the company spent 10 years and $10 million developing LabVIEW through version 2.0.

Here, it’s worth mentioning that despite LabVIEW being the company’s flagship product and its deep penetration in the engineering community, National Instruments avoided the rivalry between software and hardware groups common in engineering outfits.

Figure 5 Over the years, LabVIEW became a popular tool among instrument control engineers. Source: National Instruments

Besides its flagship product, LabVIEW, the company continued to provide a broad mix of software and modular hardware solutions to help engineers design and deploy systems for measurement, automation, and embedded applications. The company’s versatile I/O solutions allowed users to reconfigure their existing hardware in software, bypassing the need to purchase new devices each time they require a different type of application.

It also added plug-in data-acquisition boards, serial-port control, USB, VXI, PXI, and FPGAs to its test and measurement solutions. The Austin, Texas-based company also diligently protected graphical programming language patents in a highly competitive test and measurement world. Moreover, NI made several acquisitions to complement its products, including Intelligent Instrumentation, Keithley Instruments, Measurement Computing, and Data Translation.

When the company went public in 1995, over 300 current and former employees owned stock. But what went wrong in the company with the goal to do for scientists and engineers what the spreadsheet had done for financial analysis? Filippo Persia, a former employee, outlined some of the issues in his article published on LinkedIn.

What went wrong?

According to Persia, after Truchard’s departure in 2017, new management shifted gears and started hiring external VPs, who often failed to understand NI’s unique ecosystem. Their “silver bullet” solutions didn’t often grasp the complexities of the company and its environment. As a result, NI sometimes offered as many as three variants of the same product.

The complexity also created additional costs for NI as well as customers because a significant amount of time and effort were spent on tailoring suitable configurations. At the same time, NI reduced its local presence in various geographies to cut operational costs. That led to a lower level of service, ultimately hurting revenue generation and customer satisfaction.

Persia also opines that while the company built its success on technologies like PCIe, PXIe, and CompactRIO, it has missed the data center and mobile revolutions. “Develop a dedicated product line targeting data center and mobile applications, ensuring compatibility and seamless integration with existing NI products and the LabVIEW ecosystem,” he wrote.

Figure 6 Emerson has the gigantic task of integrating NI’s unique test and measurement ecosystem into its industrial automation solutions. Source: National Instruments

In his LinkedIn article titled “National Instruments: A Path Forward Under Emerson Electric,” Persia has also outlined steps Emerson can take to bring NI back to prominence. For instance, he suggests simplifying the product portfolio by reducing the number of product variants and eliminating redundancies to ensure a more manageable and cost-effective product lineup.

Persia hopes Emerson’s deep pocket will help NI reevaluate the balance between cost savings and service quality by reestablishing localized support teams in key markets. He also anticipates that Emerson will help the new Test & Measurement unit to implement a hybrid approach that combines centralized support functions with localized teams to facilitate cost-efficient yet high-quality service to customers across different regions.

Industrial automation pursuit

NI’s test and measurement solutions mainly comprise an I/O system complemented with a data processing unit (CPU or FPGA), a communication bus, and an output format GUI for scientific data. So, Fortive and Keysight also became contenders after the news broke out about Emerson’s interest in NI in January this year.

However, Emerson, which already owned approximately 2.3 million shares of NI, representing about 2% of outstanding shares, persisted in its pursuit to snap the test equipment supplier. Emerson, aiming to reshape itself as an industrial automation titan, is tapping the high-growth area of testing and measurement, and here, it sees NI’s software-connected automated systems as part of the critical push to transform its electronics manufacturing solutions.

It’ll be interesting to watch how Emerson integrates NI’s unique test and measurement ecosystem in its vast industrial operations. And how it aligns NI’s test solutions with its industrial automation operations.

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The post The story of NI and its influence on instrument control appeared first on EDN.

The story of NI and its influence on instrument control

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