National Instruments eyes new opportunities in a connected India

National Instruments (NI), the US-based global test and measurement solution provider, is eyeing new opportunities in the connected world through its software capabilities.

NI’s platforms, which help companies in vehicle data logging, production tests, automotive radar and autonomous vehicles, is offering various test solutions for the automotive industry in India.

The company foresees new business coming its way technology gets integrated with increasing software in vehicles. This requires OEMs to conduct software tests which in turn creates business opportunities for engineering solution providers like NI.

Talking to Autocar Professional, Ajit Gokhale, senior vice-president, Global Product Marketing, National Instruments, said, “The automotive industry is one of the high growth sectors worldwide for us among the 10 different sectors that we cater to. We have a good presence in all the key automotive markets including Japan, China, Korea, India, US and Europe and it continues to perform well. We see India one of the key markets in Asia.”

NI, in India, has been largely engaged with Tier 1 and 2 suppliers, enabling faster data acquisition and measurement techniques.

Opportunity in driverless cars  

NI has been working on emerging solutions like driverless cars and electric vehicles globally. Its strong electronic and mechanical capabilities and huge experience in data acquisition helps address these new-age challenges. The company has been working in a big way on algorithms for driverless cars to detect physical objects, people and other visual data to enable a safe drive.

According to Gokhale, currently autonomous cars are evolving and are in a prototyping and R&D phase. This means they will take time before going to production. “We will be involved in all phases, which we call measurement through the design flow, research, validations, verification and production,” he says.

On the electric mobility front, NI’s focus is on Tier 1 suppliers as the company has battery testing solutions, mathematics and algorithms from prototyping and all the way to production. Two years ago, the company helped Tata Motors with hardware andf loop testing for its electric bus.

Increasing software in cars and the need to verify it requires more hardware and loop testing in the automotive sector. Growing vehicle recalls and issues on emission, quality, defects and battery testing for safety faced by OEMs today is increasing testing requirements.

Jayaram Pillai, managing director – IndRAA, National Instruments, said, “India manufacturers are investing heavily in R&D to enhance quality. Suppliers too have been working on improving quality as they are exporting their products to developed markets, offering an opportunity for us in the automotive sector.”

“Our technologies are very apt for the automotive industry as faster technological developments call for new features and growing software in cars today. Automotive is the most receptive sector on the test front which offers opportunities to us and we play a larger role helping companies to face them appropriately,” he added.   

Globally, NI spends a significant part of its revenue on R&D. The company has a large R&D team in Bangalore working on global programs and the facility is among the fastest growing tech centres globally. NI says it has around 1,000 partners assisting in its technology development and nearly 60 of them are from India.

Hosts 13th edition of NIDays

On October 19, NI hosted its 13th edition of NIDays, an annual conference on graphical system design, in Bangalore. The event was attended by over 500 engineers, scientists, and experts from industry and academia who discussed the trends, opportunities and challenges that lie in the future of connected systems. 

In the day-long conference, NI India launched the latest version of its flagship product, LabVIEW 2016, with enhancements in acquiring, processing and managing data from remote data acquisition systems.

NI says its tools have proven to be instrumental in the success of a lot of Indian customers and their applications. This year, it has added various new products aimed at accelerating the productivity of engineers and researchers working in the areas of IoT, 5G and industrial automation. Some of these tools enable applications that previously seemed too ambitious because of their complexities.

The new range of products launched at the conference includes high-performance PXI instrumentation for processing and sensing at the edge, MIMO Application Frame work which provides wireless researchers with a fully open reference solution to accelerate 5G prototyping, an early access technology platform for TSN which delivers mechanisms to create distributed, synchronised, hard real-time systems over standard Ethernet, NI Hardware-in-the-Loop (HIL) Simulator which helps drive down the cost of test for customers, software-centric NI PXI Digital Pattern Instrument used by semiconductor characterisation and production test engineers to drive down the cost of their tests and ensure product quality.