Custom Hardware Design Is Dead

Janine Love
EETimes (8/6/2013 02:10 PM EDT)

AUSTIN, Texas — I have long had a strong interest in test equipment, but it is a rare opportunity to be in a live community of 4,000 people who are jazzed up about instrumentation and the creative opportunities it can enable. I'm on the scene at NI Week in Austin, Texas, and the event kicked off with an energetic and entertaining keynote that showcased some new products and creative applications.

First up was Dr. James Joseph Truchard, who emphasized the move from instrumentation and embedded systems to a combination of the two in "virtual instruments." He reflected on last year's launch of the vector signal transceiver. It is now being used in instrumentation applications in communications and RF (as we all expected), as well as to build software-defined radios. Truchard also reflected on where things are going next, echoing a conversation I was having with our own Larry Desjardin yesterday. Citing a study conducted in Germany, Truchard posited that a key component of the "fourth industrial revolution" will be cyber physical systems (CPS).

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