The Greatest Impact On Automation And Controls In The Next Five Years

Software abstraction – Graphical system design is a great example how software abstraction increases the productivity of engineers and scientist from different industries and application areas.

 

Embedded processing – The ever increasing processing performance and the lower footprint of processors enables companies like National Instruments to bring technologies like multi-core processors into the industrial space and create off-the-shelf embedded systems that engineers and scientist can adopt for the most demanding applications.

 

Reconfigurable hardware – With shorter design cycles and increased pressure to innovate, reconfigurable hardware like field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) provides the industry with a solution to create custom functionality with hardware performance without the investment and effort of designing an ASIC or custom board. Embedded in off-the-shelf systems and programmable with high-level design tools like NI LabVIEW software, these technologies are accessible for engineers and scientists with little embedded expertise.

 

The combination of a real-time processor, programmable logic and modular I/O within one system – National Instruments refers to this technology as RIO technology but we see a wide adoption for this concept in the industry.

 

Proliferation of Sensors - High-performance measurements are the key to solving sophisticated control problems and realizing robust systems. New technologies and the wide use of sensors in commercial products like smart phones or the Wii gaming console (and many others) have been increasing the availability of sensors and reduced the cost. This trend will continue and so we will see a proliferation of sensors in industrial applications.

 

Networking, synchronization and security – The increasing number of embedded and control systems used to solve today’s applications also increases the need for networking, synchronization and security technologies. And while there are a lot of different standards available today, the integration is where we expect a lot of innovation over the next couple of years.

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