A record-setting 3,400 of the National Instruments faithful descended on Austin during the first week of August for the company's NIWeek 2012 celebration of all things LabView. The week-long technical conference for the company's user and developer community addressed the breadth and depth of NI applications — from embedded industrial control to Higgs boson research — and has evolved since its launch in 1994 into the primary venue for the company to unveil the fruit of its latest R&D efforts. This year, the company set its sights on the audacious task of "Redefining Instrumentation." And in this case, they weren't talking about a new pressure transmitter or better thermocouple, but about the high-frequency bench-top and rack-mount devices used to design and test complex electronic systems. Each of these high-performance, purpose-built devices can run into the tens of thousands of dollars, according to Charles Schroeder, NI director of marketing for test, who also led the company's development effort. The problem with traditional instrumentation is that it simply hasn't kept pace with advances in underlying computing technology, Schroeder explained, noting the explosion in smartphone capabilities over the past decade even as instrumentation performance and functionality have advanced only incrementally. He attributed the rapid advances in mobile device capability in part to an open platform together with a robust ecosystem of developers that could push device capabilities forward. "You can go from megabits to gigabits [in processor speed], but it doesn't help if the software doesn't advance."Instrument users, on the other hand, have had no choice but to wait — often in vain — for suppliers to add that needed functionality. "But now we're talking about Moore's Law for instrumentation — a fundamental shift in how instrumentation is designed and used," Schroeder said. NI calls this concept a "software-designed" instrument. And in NI's case, that means instrumentation developed from the bottom up using NI's LabView graphical design environment. This allows customers to use NI's instrumentation directly off-the-shelf, or to effectively reprogram the device "all the way down to the pins," Schroeder said.