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AWR Connected™
National Instruments
Linking RF Design and Test through AWR Software and National Instruments LabVIEW/T&M
Designers have long used LabVIEW as a programming language to automate instrumentation. AWR and National Instruments have begun to blur the lines between the software solutions. The AWR Design Environment™ provides a convenient plug-n-play interface to LabVIEW, adding support for a broad range of signal processing and software-defined, virtual instrumentation control of NI T&M equipment for RF device testing into its product portfolio.
Hardware-in-the-loop
AWR's software can call LabVIEW directly via a Virtual Instrument (VI) server interface, such that the LabVIEW environment can be accessed for further domain-specific analyses with AWR's software such as Microwave Office™ and Visual System Simulator™ (VSS). In this way, the correlation of both simulated and actual measurements can be acquired in the LabVIEW environment and within the AWR software environment as well. Consequently, a simulateable model of the device under test (DUT) is achieved with an AWR/LabVIEW heterogeneous environment, providing designers with the ability to build, test and validate design cases earlier in the product design cycle.
AWR Connected for National Instruments delivers a hardware-in-the-loop design flow that can consist of Microwave Office software for circuit simulation, LabVIEW for the signal processing and virtual control of hardware, like NI's PXI instrumentation, as well as VSS for the system-level simulation of the DUT.
Signal Processing
AWR's VSS software can call LabVIEW directly via a Virtual Instrument (VI) server interface, such that LabVIEW can be accessed inside of VSS for further, additional and/or specific signal processing. In this way, the design is controlled at the macro-level by VSS with LabVIEW providing additional on-demand signal generation and signal processing capabilities embedded from within the VSS software environment.