Zigbee is a wireless standard for personal area network (PAN) sensor monitoring and control. Learn how National Instruments Alliance Partner SeaSolve has developed a test suite including transmit (Tx), receive (Rx) and compliance testing for Zigbee. In this application note, we will describe test methodologies and techniques for each type of testing.

This document discusses RF streaming recording and playback as well as best practices for increasing signal integrity.

As RFID adoption continues to grow, engineers are faced with an increasing need to validate tags both for interoperability with products from other vendors and for conformance with the specified protocol. In today's market, these test needs are coupled with increasing pressure to improve tag performance. As one might expect, RFID system designers face a significant test challenge when attempting to meet the needs of this emerging market. Fortunately, the demand for RFID technology has spawned both significant industry grown and innovation. In fact, researchers in both the research and commercial environment have often elected to use National Instruments measurement equipment to characterize both tag and reader performance.

From the airplane pilot operating guiding a Boeing 747, to the everyday consumer using a GPS navigation system in his car, to the hobbyist searching for buried treasure in the forest, GPS technology is quickly becoming integrated into a wide variety of applications. As innovation drives GPS receivers to even better performance, techniques used to characterize performance are becoming increasingly sophisticated as well. Today, the power of software enables you to create GPS waveforms that accurately emulate the real word signal. In addition, advances in instrument bus technology enable record and playback of live GPS signals with PXI instrumentation.

High-level design tools offer field-programmable gate array (FPGA) technology to engineers and scientists who have little or no digital hardware design expertise. Whether you use graphical programming, C, or VHDL, the synthesis process is quite complex and can leave you wondering how FPGAs really work. What actually happens inside the chip to make programs execute within configurable blocks of silicon? This white paper is intended for the nondigital designer who wants to understand the fundamental parts of an FPGA and how it all works "under the hood." This information, also helpful when using high-level design tools, hopefully can shed some light on the inner workings of an extraordinary technology.

One of the most common data acquisition applications is simply logging acquired data to disk or a database for future analysis. Most National Instruments data acquisition (DAQ) devices are shipped with FREE data-logging software. Depending on your data-logging application requirements, you may need additional functionality. This article introduces the three levels of data-logging software for use with National Instruments DAQ devices – NI LabVIEW SignalExpress, NI LabVIEW SignalExpress LE and NI LabVIEW.

Today’s Teaching Trends: Hands-on Learning

In order to mitigate the challenge of declining enrollment, Educators are now incorporating hands-on, experiential learning techniques into the classroom. By giving students the opportunity to interact with real-world signals and compare the simulation results, educators find that students learn concepts much better. LabVIEW SignalExpress, an interactive environment built on the industry-leading NI LabVIEW Graphical System Design platform helps make hands-on, experiential learning possible for students across multiple disciplines, from biomedical engineering to aerospace engineering and across multiple years, from freshmen to senior with its powerful, interactive, step-by-step approach. Some of the benefits of using NI LabVIEW SignalExpress in the classroom as are follows

The CompactDAQ platform expands to now offer over 30 measurement modules and new, free data-logging software. This overview will highlight all that is new with CompactDAQ and C Series modules since the first launch.

National Instruments LabVIEW SignalExpress is interactive software for common instrument control, analysis and data display tasks. This application note outlines how you can connect to and control over 400 stand-alone and modular instruments with NI LabVIEW SignalExpress.

First used in the mid-1960s, emitter-coupled logic (ECL) is an important logic family predominantly because of its ability to operate at very high speeds. Additionally, because ECL is a differential standard, it offers better noise immunity than single-ended standards such as TTL. This application note will discuss three methods for interfacing single-ended NI PXI-655x digital waveform generator/analyzers to ECL logic:

Single-ended ECL
Differential ECL
Using an off-board TTL-ECL translator

Interfacing to PECL (positive emitter-coupled logic) can be done using these same methods; however, you must
change the acquisition and generation voltage levels of the PXI-655x. In fact, some ECL buffer chips can change
between the two logic families by simply changing the polarity of their power supply.