National Instruments

The National Instruments Corporation, doing business as NI, is an American multinational company with international operations. Headquartered in Austin, Texas, United States, it is a producer of automated test equipment, semiconductor production, and virtual instrumentation software. Common applications include data acquisition (DAQ), instrument control, system management, and machine learning and vision. Following its acquisition by Emerson Electric, the NI has operated the company’s test and measurement business unit since October 2023.
In 2022, the company sold products to more than 35,000 companies worldwide with revenues of US$1.66 billion.
In the early 1970s, James Truchard, Jeff Kodosky, and Bill Nowlin were employed at the University of Texas at Austin Applied Research Laboratories. While working on a project for the U.S. Navy, they utilized early computer technology to collect and analyze data. Frustrated by the inefficient data collection methods at their disposal, the trio decided to create a new product for this purpose. In 1976, they founded a company while working in Truchard's garage. They initially attempted to incorporate under names such as Longhorn Instruments and Texas Digital, but these were rejected. Ultimately, they settled on the name National Instruments.
With a $10,000 loan from Interfirst Bank, the group purchased a PDP-11/04 minicomputer and embarked on their first project by designing and building a GPIB interface for it. Their initial sale stemmed from a cold call to Kelly Air Force Base in San Antonio. At that time, the three founders were still employed at the University of Texas.
In 1977, they took a significant step by hiring their first full-time employee, Kim Harrison-Hosen, who was responsible for handling orders, billing, and customer inquiries. By the end of that year, they had sold three boards, and to encourage further business, the company produced and distributed a mailer to 15,000 users of the PDP-11 minicomputer. As sales began to rise, they were able to relocate to a dedicated office space in 1978, occupying a 600-square-foot office at 9513 Burnet Road in Austin.
At the end of the 1970s, the company booked $400,000 in orders, recording a $60,000 profit. In 1980, Truchard, Kodosky, and Nowlin quit their jobs to devote themselves full-time to National Instruments. At the end of the year, they moved the company to a larger office, renting 5,000 square feet (500 m) of office space. To assist in generating revenue, the company undertook numerous special projects, including a fuel-pump credit-card system and a waveform generator for U.S. Navy sonar acoustic testing. In 1981, the company reached the $1 million sales mark, leading them to move to a 10,000-square-foot (1,000 m) office in 1982.
In 1983, National Instruments developed its first GPIB board to connect instruments to IBM PCs. With the arrival of the Macintosh computer, Kodosky began a research initiative with the assistance of student researchers at the University of Texas into ways to exploit the new interface. This led to the creation of NI's flagship product, the LabVIEW graphical development platform for the Macintosh computer, which was released in 1986. The software allows engineers and scientists to program graphically by "wiring" icons together instead of typing text-based code. The following year, a version of LabVIEW, known as LabWindows, was released for the DOS environment.
The company had 100 employees by 1986. NI opened its first international branch in Tokyo in 1987.
After growing their staff enough to take over almost the entire building they were renting, in 1990, NI moved to a new building at 6504 Bridge Point Parkway, which the company purchased in 1991. The building, located along Lake Austin near the Loop 360 Bridge, became known as "Silicon Hills = Bridge Point."
NI received its first patent for LabVIEW in 1991. Later in the same year, they introduced Signal Conditioning eXtensions for Instrumentation (SCXI) to expand the signal-processing capabilities of the PC, and in 1992, LabVIEW was first released for Windows-based PCs and Unix workstations. NI also created the National Instruments Alliance Partner program. In 1993, the company reached the milestone of $100 million in annual sales. To attract C/C++ programmers, later that year, NI introduced LabWindows/CVI. The following year, an employee began experiments with the relatively new World Wide Web and developed natinst.com, the company's very first web page.
The company began to run out of room on their approximately 136,000-square-foot (12,600 m) campus. In 1994, NI broke ground on a new campus, located at a 72-acre (290,000 m) site along North Mopac Boulevard in northern Austin. By this time, NI had reached 1,000 employees. The new NI campus, which opened in 1998, was designed to be employee-friendly. It contains dedicated "play" areas, including basketball and volleyball courts, an employee gym, and a campus-wide walking trail. Each of the buildings on the campus is lined with windows and features an open floor plan. "Dr. T", as the employees call their CEO, sits in an open cubicle and does not have an assigned parking space. Employees had been granted stock in the privately held company as part of their compensation packages. When the company chose to go public in 1995, over 300 current and former employees owned stock. The company was listed on the Nasdaq exchange as NATI.
By the late 1990s, the more advanced DAQ boards were provided by the company, which could replace vendor-defined instruments with a custom PC-based system. With the company's acquisition of Georgetown Systems Lookout software, NI products were further incorporated into applications run on the factory-floor. By 1996, the company had reached $200 million in annual sales and was named to Forbes magazine's 200 Best Small Companies list. Over the next several years, NI released machine vision software and hardware. NI also introduced the CompactPCI-based PXI, an open industry standard for modular measurement and automation, and NI TestStand, which provides for tracking high-volume manufacturing tests.
User traffic and e-commerce rapidly improved after the company acquired the ni.com domain and began investing in web technologies. They introduced the NI Developer Zone, which provides end-user developers access to example programs, sample code, and development tips, as well as forums for users and NI employees.
In the 2000s, NI began exporting most of its manufacturing overseas by opening its 144,000-square-foot (13,400 m) manufacturing plant in Debrecen, Hungary. NI now manufactures nearly 90% of its production in Debrecen and has expanded several times in the last decade. In 2011, with a multimillion-dollar grant from the government, NI increased production in Debrecen by approximately 20%. With state-of-the-art automation processes, headcount increased by only 2%. In 2002, the company dedicated the 379,000-square-foot (35,200 m) Building C on their Mopac campus, which became the headquarters for the company's R&D operations. Upon completion of this building, the NI campus finally had enough capacity to move all Austin-based employees to a single location.
Following the company model of selling directly to customers, by 2006, NI had opened 21 sales offices in Europe and 12 offices in the Asia/Pacific region, as well as a multitude of offices in the Americas, Africa, and the Middle East. Research and Development centers are located in the United States, Germany, India, Romania, China, Canada, and Malaysia.
In 2005 NI acquired Measurement Computing, a provider of low-cost data acquisition products.
In January 2013, National Instruments acquired all outstanding shares of Digilent Inc., which became a wholly owned subsidiary. Digilent was founded in 2000 by two Washington State University electrical engineering professors, Clint Cole and Gene Apperson, and grew to become a multinational corporation with sales of test and development products to universities. Digilent developed the open standard Pmod Interface.
On June 16, 2020, National Instruments announced that they were officially changing the company's name to "NI". On May 4, 2021, NI announced the acquisition of monoDrive, a provider of simulation software for advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) and autonomous vehicle development. In March 2022, it was announced that NI had completed the acquisition of Heinzinger Automotive GmbH, the electronic vehicle systems business of Rosenheim-based Heinzinger Electronic GmbH.
After months of failed negotiations to purchase NI, industrial conglomerate Emerson Electric announced a hostile takeover bid for NI in an appeal directly to shareholders in early 2023. In April 2023, NI agreed to be sold for $8.2 billion in an all-cash deal. which was completed in October 2023. Within Emerson, NI now operates as a new Test & Measurement business group, headquartered in Austin, Texas.
National Instruments' engineering software includes:
National Instruments' hardware platforms include:
The National Instruments Electronics Workbench Group is responsible for creating the electronic circuit design software NI Multisim and NI Ultiboard, which was previously a Canada-based company that first produced MultiSIM, and integrated ULTIboard with it.
Interactive Image Technologies was founded in Toronto, Ontario, by Joe Koenig, and specializes in producing educational movies and documentaries. When the government of Ontario needed an educational tool for teaching electronics in colleges, the company created a circuit simulator called the Electronics Workbench. In 1996, Interactive Image Technologies appointed its vice president, Roy Bryant, as Chief Operating Officer to oversee the day-to-day operations of the company and to grow the company's electronic design automation (EDA) products. Bryant is credited with "overseeing the development and marketing of the company's Electronics Workbench EDA product". In 1998, the company started a strategic partnership with another electronic design automation company named Ultimate Technology from Naarden, Netherlands, who was the European market leader in printed circuit board design software, with their package ULTIboard. Like Electronics Workbench, founder James Post gained PR fame when he organized the distribution of 180,000 demo floppy disks via electronics magazines in Europe.
In 1999, the companies merged and renamed themselves after their most well known product, the Electronics Workbench. Then the product line consisted of schematic capture, simulation product named MultiSIM and printed circuit board software called Ultiboard.
In 2005, the company was acquired by National Instruments and rebranded as National Instruments Electronics Workbench Group.
Beginning in 1995, National Instruments has held an annual developer conference in Austin, NIWeek. The week-long conference was held at the Austin Convention Center. Activities there were presented both by NI employees and external presenters. An exhibition hall allows selected industry integrators and suppliers to showcase their products, and various customers or university students also present papers on their work with NI tools.