Michael Majchrzak, Publisher of Control Engineering Polska, interviews Jeff Kodosky, Founder of National Instruments (NI).
I had the pleasure of interviewing Jeff Kodosky, one of the founders of National Instruments, one of the world?s most innovative technology companies, and the father of its marquee product, LabVIEW (LV). We talked a lot about LabVIEW, the rapid changes in technology and the impact that these changes will have not only on industry, but also on National Instruments as a company.
Michael Majchrzak: What is the future of LabVIEW and what changes are you making now to get there?
Jeff Kodosky: LabVIEW has applications in hundred of industries, and is currently being used at such companies as Elon Musk?s Space X, the CERN super collider in Switzerland, and in most of the main line automobile manufacturers around the world, just to name a few.
In terms of future direction, we have made investments in many different areas, including in the LabVIEW team as well as investments into R&D for LabVIEW. These investments keeps getting larger and larger, however the most exciting area is LabVIEW for FPGA (Field-programmable gate array). More and more products have embedded FPGA in them. This trend will continue in the future with FPGA in higher end products. The fact that LabVIEW can program the FPGA means that you can have domain experts that can program the FPGA as opposed to having programmers of VHDL do it.
MM: Can you give us some examples of some of the new products that you are developing for LabVIEW?
JK: We have recently launched our newest product, LabVIEW Comms (LabVIEW Communications System Design Suite, ed.). LabVIEW Comms is aimed at RF designers who are building the next generation of 5G RF communications systems. This enables people to develop high performance algorithms that compile very efficiently for FPGA. Researchers for 5G technologies are using our hardware and software because of the FPGA. Since 2004 we have LV FPGA, but the number of possibilities that people are using it for just keeps expanding. While I was here in Poland I visited a Polish company doing high-speed robotic control for surgery. That would not be possible without FPGA. It?s all very exciting.
MM: There are millions of Android devices. What does it mean for National Instruments and LabVIEW in particular?
JK: Our newest FPGA devices have the Zynq chip from Xilinx with a dual core ARM processor with the new C-RIO chassis. We run Linux RT on it. Use your imagination where that might go.
MM: Speaking of open systems, Apple just announced that their new programming language for iOS apps and the Mac called SWIFT is now going to be open source. Is that the direction that you are moving as well?
JK: Internal development is working with a variety of opened sourced things and it is one of our most active research topics.
MM: You mention in NI?s ?Trend Watch? bulletin the Maker Movement, Kickstarter and the democratization of entrepreneurship. What do these radical changes mean for National Instruments and LabVIEW? Do you plan to reach non-engineers with your products in the future?
JK: We support the Makerspace and giving people more control over what they are doing. These changes will change the world dramatically in the next decade and we are still trying to figure out how to take advantage of that. Legos is a good example in getting kids started making things with LabVIEW. How LabVIEW will fit in these other areas of testing and control is not clear right now. Even though our role is not 100% clear, it is clear that we will be able to work in this market and we are in an excellent position to make it in this area, like we did with Lego. We look forward to the opportunity.
MM: I know that NI prides itself on being in many different sectors for test and measurement, circuit design, etc, but what about manufacturing in particular? What are some of the applications of NI products like LabVIEW in this specific environment?
JK: Our expertise in manufacturing comes in the high end where precision measurements need to be made or where very high speed control needs to be done. We can monitor rotating assets, vibration measurement, collect a lot of data, etc. Frequency range and data collection on the much higher end can help in areas such as predicative maintenance.
MM: I am interested in the application of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) to manufacturing as well. Can you give me some examples of what types of devices in a manufacturing setting would be connected and how NI would be able help these manufacturers and suppliers successfully implement these devices into their production and design/prototyping systems?
JK: Technology and networking is changing and there is going to be a qualitative difference in measurement systems and IIoT that is going to change the future. There have been many attempts to label the phenomenon, but it is all the same concept.
It is called IIoT in the US, ?Industry 4.0? or ?Factory 4.0? in Europe, etc, but no matter what you call it, it is all talking about the same thing: better communication, networking and cloud based management of industrial processes.
Open standards in the IIoT is going to become more of the standard and this will be a good development for programmers and designers alike. Standards that make interconnections safe and secure will win in the end. With this trend in mind, we now have open source Linux and Linux RT on our newest chassis and in the back end of LabVIEW LLVM (open source too). We had proprietary language but we could not improve it as fast as necessary because there wee too many people around the world using LabVIEW with different instruments. We quickly realized that the way that you get faster innovation in the market is by having open systems.
In general the field of IIoT is very interesting for us and it is one of our current strategies. We are concentrating on using network-distributed systems for more focused engineering solutions and we see lots of opportunities there that we are working on in our research and development.
MM: Much is being done in the area of wireless technology in the manufacturing space. What are your thoughts of wireless and does it apply to LabVIEW and other applications in manufacturing?
JK: Wireless is a big part of that since reducing cabling will greatly reduce the cost. Of course signal integrity and security of the communications over wireless is very important and those are areas where we have active research going.
MM: NI is well entrenched in the automobile manufacturing industry and its supply chain. One area that is being talked about a lot is self-driving car technology. How does NI hope to contribute to this new technology in terms of design and implementation?
JK: Self-driving cars will be a good thing. I worry about cars driven by humans that are texting as being more dangerous than cars without drivers! Driverless cars will be aided by such technologies as radar systems, cellular systems for multi-car communications, RF communications, vision systems, etc. All of this must tested and prototyped and because of that there is lots of opportunity for NI to be involved. There has been a lot of push to develop our RF capability and this will permeate everything that is happening with car to car communication. Lots of pieces and everything is in motion. We are in a great position to contribute a lot to these areas.
MM: Now for some more general questions. I would like to ask you a question about your strategy regarding this region of the world. You have invested in a factory in Hungary, and you have hired a large number of Poles, Romanians and other engineers and specialists from this region.What were some of the advantages and disadvantages of investing here?
JK: In the beginning finding sufficient services was a problem, but education levels and work ethic were important for us. We look for the best and the brightest and we go there. Our CFO was sensitive to the work ethic and industriousness here, as well as the stability of the political system and the economy. Some of the biggest challenges that we faced initially it was infrastructure and getting sufficient services and being able to ship products. All of that has improved since then.
MM: Final question: With all of the changes to technology and business models in general, what will NI look like as a company in 5-10 years from now?
JK: Generally I don?t see us being much different than we are now in terms of us being a mix of hardware and software. Our goal has always been to provide broad based tools to engineers and scientists in whatever discipline to make them more productive. We are going to figure out what that means as technology changes and we will change with them. In regards to new protocols, processors and smart sensors, we are going to figure out how to integrate those into an environment that will make people who are developing those systems more productive. LabVIEW will be a big part of that. The blend of hardware and software is continuing. More importantly I hope from a cultural point of view that the company remains largely the way it is. I am most proud of the culture that we?ve built at National Instruments.
Generally speaking there is no way can do it all. All technology is fascinating. If there is a new opportunity and if we can find a customer that is out ahead of the pack and is willing to collaborate and are willing to bring this to the market then we will work with them. Our customers will lead us in the right direction.
MM: Thank you.
