National Instruments may be best known through the RF/microwave world’s test labs for LabVIEW, its flagship software product that provides a platform for developing automated data acquisition systems and the modular instruments that perform actual RF tests. Recently, through internal R&D and acquisitions,  the company has been growing its RF solutions to provide more capabilities and performance in test hardware operating  at RF frequencies and above. With the acquisition AWR and the RF EDA platform, Microwave Office, NI has also pushed its solution further upstream in the overall design process.

For nearly two decades, the company has organized a gathering of its technologists and power users for three days of keynotes, workshops, panels and exhibition at an event called NIWeek. NIWeek is an opportunity for technologists developing test and data acquisition solutions with NI products to learn about the latest product advances/releases, cool applications, and company’s vision/direction.  Given the broad range of applications that NI’s software products address, NIWeek brings together technologists engaged in a broad range of disciplines, from transportation to biomedicine. The company’s recent focus on providing software and hardware solutions specifically addressing RF/microwave and wireless technology has made NIWeek an important industry event.

In previous years, the company introduced its NIWeek audience to AWR and Phase Matrix during the opening keynote presentation and unveiled the world’s first Vector Signal Transceiver. This year, the company has organized an RF & Wireless Summit featuring talks from technologists and visionaries leading the development of next generation communication systems. The program includes a summit panel that will look at the adoption of modular instrumentation for wireless test solutions. This panel session looks at how the complexity of testing communication ICs for functionality, multi-band, multi-mode requirements, and high-performance metrics is forcing the industry to adopt new solutions for both design and production testing. The panel will consider these factors in their discussion of recent advances in modular instrumentation and software to address communication device testing, including the increasing need for measurement speed and automation to address the high volume of devices that need to be evaluated to meet the world demand for wireless products.

 The panel session will be moderated by David Hall of NI and will feature five panelists with backgrounds in communication IC development, test solutions and industry trends. Microwave Journal has been invited to join this panel representing the perspective of industry requirements and trends. I will be joining the conversation as a panelist and Microwave Journal will be the media partner supporting the event. As a result, the panel will be available for viewing as a live stream through the National Instruments and Microwave Journal web sites. This is a first of its kind event that will tie in live streaming and social media to expand the NIWeek program to an audience on the web. Attendees will be able to participate by asking questions of the panelists. We hope you will join us on Tuesday, August 6^th at 4:45 pm CDT.