National Instruments Electronics Workbench Group | A Year in Review

By Bhavesh Mistry, Product Marketing, National Instruments Electronics Workbench Group

 

I recently was at NI corporate headquarters in Austin, Texas and talked with two NI employees who where integral in the acquisition of the former Electronics Workbench: Ash Razdan, Director of Corporate Development, and Jon Bellin, Vice President of R&D, Application and System Software. In this informal chat I ask them about the changes since the acquisition of Electronics Workbench three years ago, the successes of the past year, and the future for Multisim and Ultiboard. Our talk was timely, as January 2008 marked the one-year anniversary of the first release of NI Multisim (version 10.0).

 

Looking back over the past three years, what major changes do you see at the NI Electronics Workbench Group?

Ash:  The changes that come to my mind are that we successfully made Multisim an integral part of our software strategy, and completely integrated operations with NI.  The integration permitted us to leverage global NI offices, systems and processes to better serve and locally support customers.  As I look at the ni.com/multisim domain I am taken aback by the number of resources, technical papers, tutorials and discussion forums available to customers.  The open internet community mirrors the customer experience for the rest of our NI products and has made it easy to learn about products benefits, new features, and pricing.

(Ash and I pause a moment to look online to view some of the latest Ultiboard tutorials that had just been published to ni.com)

Jon: I can certainly speak to the changes in R&D, which have seen us apply all of the formal NI procedures to the engineering processes at EWB. By bringing the production of Multisim and Ultiboard directly under the detailed approach and quality standards of an NI product, we have adopted the same procedures, applications, initiatives and aggressive approaches to testing - such as with system level testing of software and regression testing.

 

Ash, you mentioned online pricing. We recently introduced new pricing for all of our professional products. Maybe you can talk a little about this.

Ash: I’m personally excited about our new pricing which was effective January 1 (2008).  Multisim and our other NI software (most notably LabVIEW) share many of the same customers and markets.  By providing more seamless integration between electronics design software and NI LabVIEW-based virtual instrumentation, our mutual customers benefit by having fewer design iterations and reduced test times.  Our goal was to make our products accessible and competitively priced for any engineer or designer whether doing SPICE simulation, PCB layout, or validation/verification test.

Jon, how would you describe the NI philosophy on software design?

Jon: Well my personal philosophy is - I hate bugs!

(Jon laughs as he says this –he also clenches his fists asserting his seriousness)

This is the NI mentality. One of the elements of the NI development process that has been consistent over my years, and even before my time, is that development engineers engage and participate in system level testing. This requires each engineer to not only unit test but also look at their code as a part of the entire system.  Developers look at their contribution to an application from a system level rather than as small units of code – and more importantly from the perspective of a customer. This is the perspective that acts as a check on our quality.

So, quality is the overarching initiative for software development.

Jon: Of course, the fact is that I am a software user, like all of our developers, and we hate to see defects in the software that we use. We are aggressive on system-level testing because it fundamentally breeds empathy for our customers. We want to make using our software as efficient as possible for them.

For Multisim and Ultiboard, the R&D process has been completely integrated into our standard new product planning and introduction process (NPI). Development is structured, and must go through the same scheduled V&V (verification and validation) plans, system testing, and lengthy Alpha and Beta periods we have for all other NI software. In our upcoming release one of our most important ‘features’ has been addressing reported issues (from customers, internal feedback etc…) in the software…

(Jon pauses for a moment and very succinctly punctuates his comment with…)

…Quality software is our primary goal.

 

Could you comment on the R&D investment for Multisim and Ultiboard?

Jon: We invested heavily in building a team of software engineers. Multisim and Ultiboard are important products, both as a PCB design tool and as a teaching tool in academia.  Our vision for these products has meant substantial hiring into R&D (development and quality assurance).

Ash: We totally renovated the inside of the (Toronto) office with the exact same office furniture used at our corporate offices!

 (Ash laughs at this comment – as the furniture was actually brought up from Austin to Toronto)

Seriously though, we mirrored NI’s approach to technical support, recently switching to the standard NI support processes (telephone and e-mail system) and hired a full time Product Support Engineer (PSE) who is responsible for managing support and customer feedback.

Jon: Speaking of the PSE, PSEs definitely have an important role as a part of the R&D and support teams. They have responsibility for passing customer feedback to R&D and management. Our Toronto PSE organized our first formal NI Beta program. This testing procedure gets the software into the hands of the users for testing in the field.

 

It’s been one year since the launch of the first official NI version of Multisim and Ultiboard (version 10.0).  Looking back on the year, what have been the highlights for you?

Jon: Our over-arching initiative on quality has been important for me. Every new process and practice put into effect has been around the quality of our product. For example, in planning our product releases, we sit down and at great length prioritize among new features, customer requests, and fixing existing problems with the product. Our first task in the release of the 10.x version of the software has been to balance new, beneficial features, with customer feedback (provided to us through our PSE) on product enhancements and defect fixing. This means better software for our customers.

Ash: The NI Multisim Analog Devices Edition is a highlight for me. Analog Devices is a $2.5 billion global manufacturer of integrated circuits used in analog and digital signal processing applications.

We created a special edition of Multisim for them, which is a free download from the ADI web site (analog.com).  ADI wanted an easy-of-use schematic capture and interactive SPICE simulator for their customers to use to evaluate their parts.  We deem this a huge success judging by the thousands of downloads since the launch and extending our reach to more professional users.

 

We have also seen some great success in the academic space this past year.

Ash: Academic is a core strategic initiative for NI.  The wide-spread use of Multisim in electronics education was a major reason for the acquisition.  NI tools are providing innovative new ways for professors and educators to overcome the challenges of traditional teaching by helping to easily transition students from theory to the physical lab.  For example by providing seamless integration between Multisim and NI ELVIS (a prototyping platform for the lab) we have a complete teaching platform which we call the Electronics Education Platform - that ensures that students have an effective path from learning textbook theory to hands-on practical experience in the lab.

 

What is in store for Multisim and Ultiboard over the next couple of years?

Jon: From an R&D perspective we continue to invest. We are expanding our team so as to continue to balance the future development of Multisim and Ultiboard, with new features, enhancements and the fixing of defects based upon feedback from customers, marketing and sales. We are committed to the development of our software.

Ash: I think we have to split the future vision into two.  The first is realizing our vision for integrated design and test by bringing the benefits of virtual instrumentation into professional PCB design.  Multisim and Ultiboard provide engineers with easy-to-use and powerful design tools.  When integrated with LabVIEW we can introduce measurements into the design flow to improve analysis during the design verification and prototype validation.  Customers can refine simulations through measurements, easily correlate measurements with simulation results, and have a complete tool chain for integrated PCB design and validation. 

 

And the second perspective?

Ash: We are going to work on improving and evolving the Electronics Education Platform.  Some leading education institutions worldwide such as (the University of California at) Berkeley, Stanford, MIT, ITT, DeVry, Imperial College in the UK, Tsing Hua and Beijing Universities in China have adopted Multisim in their curricula…

 

…Not to mention high school programs.

Ash: Exactly, the Project Lead the Way high school program also uses Multisim to teach electronics and circuits. Looking forward we’ll continue to incorporate their feedback into product development, work to expand our affiliation with textbook authors, and continue to develop curriculum resources to make it easier for educators to implement our learning platform in the classroom.

Jon: And certainly focusing on the academic side, we are certainly going to see the continued development of the Electronics Education Platform. We are currently working on our next release, and we will see LabVIEW and Multisim continue to be integrated tighter, making the process even more streamlined with some quite innovative new features.

 

Thank you guys!  I appreciate you spending the time to share your thoughts and insights with our customers.

 

Next time:  My Q&A with Vincent Accardi, the new General Manager for the NI Electronics Workbench Group.

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