Date: 13/10/2010

Indian engineers say 'Love You' to the LabVIEW

Virtual Instrumentation expert National Instruments (NI) has unveiled its new version of LabVIEW coded "LabVIEW 2010" in Indian market. While we talked to few young engineers, the interest shown in learning LabVIEW and other popular engineering design software tool MATLAB from Mathworks is quite high. At NI's own event in Bangalore held on 12th Oct 2010, Jayaram Pillai, MD, NI India has highlighted few points about NI's products and the general Indian industry and academia.

LabVIEW is used for capturing, analyzing, and simulating signals from multiple sources (sensors, PC boards remote terminals) and allows engineers to analyze, simulate the required signals and systems as per his design requirements for range of innovative applications. All this can be done on any PC or Laptop with a piece of hardware interface. Days are not too far in finding Virtual instrumentation software in smartphones and tablet computers. The innovative product example quoted by Jayaram Pillai in Indian engineering and market requirement context is "Solar powered milk chilling plant".

NI is offering low priced version of NI's products for SMEs. They are focusing on SME businesses in a big way.

On the academia front Jayaram Pillai said that only 15% of engineering graduates are hirable (Industry ready). He see most of engineering graduates lack communication skills, lack of fundamental engineering knowledge and are more interested in high paid software programming jobs rather than core engineering. His views are not much endorsed by other experts in the industry. Today's EE are more industry-ready compared to 5/10 years back.

But one thing this writer noticed in the present engineering students is they are effectively using MATLAB and LabVIEW in their college courses. MATLAB is a subject of the syllabus in most of the colleges (nearly all). LabVIEW is more used by EE community where as MATLAB is used by wide spectrum of scientific community.

However in the industry along with the MATLAB, Simulink and LabVIEW lot of other complementing engineering design software apps are used to design, simulate and test their products.