JANUARY 19--National Instruments (NI; Austin, TX) has donated $4 million worth of products and $1 million in cash to more than 100 universities in 25 countries for academic research and classroom projects that improve science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education. The contributions, which were funded with $2 million from a patent-infringement settlement, are being used for teaching and research applications in areas such as signal processing, control systems, and communications.
"The educational grant from National Instruments will provide critical hands-on experience with state-of-the-art software and equipment in a series of courses in mechanical and electrical engineering," said George Johnson, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley. "It is particularly beneficial to have the same software for a sequence of upper-division courses in circuits, controls, signal processing, instrumentation, design, and system analysis. This grant will permit our students to explore the behavior of real systems in far greater depth than is possible now through the use of advanced analytical and data visualization capability of LabVIEW."
Engineering programs at leading educational institutions such as Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Fudan University in China, and Indian Institute of Technology now have access to NI products, including PXI-based RF modules and control hardware, NI Educational Laboratory Virtual Instrumentation Suites (ELVIS), and the new NI CompactRIO reconfigurable I/O embedded control systems. With the donated equipment and the NI LabVIEW graphical development environment, students can quickly put engineering theories into practice through easy-to-use interfaces and connectivity to thousands of measurement devices.
To learn about educational discounts to qualifying academic institutions, readers can visit www.ni.com/academic.
