Speakers at a recent conference believe that engineering software used in military and aerospace applications is at the brink of a ‘tipping point’, and could experience massive change in the near future.
Design software has long been implemented to reduce the length of design cycles, at a lower cost. Ian Bell and Darcy Dement, keynote speakers at National Instruments military and Aerospace Solutions Conference, stated that it is now time for engineering test software to catch up with this and achieve similar flexibility and performance.
A recent move to provide this has been the addition of many test instrumentation companies, like Agilent and Keithley to the PXI Systems Alliance, bringing together the high-speed buses like PCI and PXI, with graphical development tools and modular measurement devices.
Bell and Dement believe that this will change the landscape of test equipment, which will soon experience a rapid change to a more software-defined approach.
The conference took place on 22 May in Loughborough, UK, and showcased the latest software-defined test systems from Ultra Electronics, Scitek, and Peak Production.
