Seizing the Opportunities in the Chinese Application Market: NI's Challenges and Answers

It has been a year since Emerson completed its acquisition of NI. NI customers may have this question:

What does Emerson's acquisition of NI mean?

How to continue investing in the test and measurement industry?

How does NI view the Chinese market?

Emerson is a global leader in automation technology and software, focusing on industries such as energy, chemicals, power and renewable energy. NI's leading and rich test and measurement products occupy a more important position in the upstream of the technology industry chain, enriching Emerson's product portfolio and providing possibilities for expanding into emerging markets such as semiconductors and new energy vehicles.

“The two companies have strong complementary businesses and are conducive to jointly exploring emerging markets and achieving win-win results,” said Ritu. “Emerson sees NI as a core component of the larger test and measurement (T&M) business, which not only helps NI reduce business costs, but also firmly maintains NI’s leadership in the test and measurement market. With this support, NI will continue to provide customers with leading test technology and high-quality services.”

In this era of performance and efficiency, a full life cycle test solution is essential. NI provides customers with comprehensive support throughout the product development cycle, covering everything from data acquisition and automated testing to research and verification. The core of NI solutions is modular hardware and open, flexible software.

Over the past year, NI has made significant progress in developing a more robust development roadmap, enhancing its existing product portfolio, and optimizing operations to provide better customer service.

Ritu pointed out some specific initiatives:

• Expand USB DAQ, C Series DAQ, and CompactRIO,
• We continue to invest in our RF portfolio by expanding our USRP and VST product lines.
• Launched new electronic loads and precision DC power supplies,
• Investing in LabVIEW+ and delivering customer-requested capabilities in FlexLogger Lite, TestStand, InstrumentStudio, and VeriStand,

• We have increased improvements to the supply chain and manufacturing processes, achieved a 93% on-time delivery rate, and significantly improved customer service levels.

The importance of the Chinese market to NI is self-evident. As Ritu emphasized, "China is NI's second largest market and is crucial to NI's success. Facing the unique needs of the Chinese market, NI will adhere to its long-term commitment and continue to increase its investment."

At the same time, NI is also aware of the uniqueness of the Chinese market. In recent years, China has transformed from a manufacturing center to a creation center, and market demand has undergone profound changes. In order to better meet the testing needs of the Chinese market, NI has also increased its investment in the Chinese market. In 2024, NI China took another important step to strengthen its local R&D capabilities and launched exclusive product plans for the Chinese market, injecting functions into application innovations in semiconductors, automobiles, commercial aerospace, and cutting-edge research fields.

Since establishing its China headquarters in Shanghai in 1999, NI has been deeply rooted in China for 26 years.

Qiao Wei, General Manager of Emerson's Test and Measurement Business Group (formerly NI) in China added: "After more than 20 years of hard work, NI has served more than 8,500 local customers and has generated nearly 10 billion yuan in revenue each year with its ecological partners. In the past five years, our pace in China has been getting faster and faster: in 2019, it became a regional headquarters; in 2021, the NI China Innovation and Development Center was established, which is the first local innovation center in the test and measurement industry and was successfully selected into the "Shanghai Pudong Large Enterprise Open Innovation Center" program; in 2023, the entity was renamed and capital was increased. When the outside world was hesitant, we chose to further invest in the local market. This year, NI China further upgraded its local R&D efforts and launched a local product roadmap.

What prompted us to accelerate the pace of transformation is the significant changes taking place in the domestic market: China has transformed from a global manufacturing center to a creative center. In many industries and technology fields such as new energy vehicles, communications, photovoltaic industry, and robots, domestic companies have already stepped into the forefront of the industry, conducting more original research and development, and leading technological trends. Companies have also expanded their horizons to the world, using local research and development to meet global needs. This market-opening path requires deeper market insights and a broader perspective than previous research and development.

Therefore, the current topic of "In China for China" is not only to bring the most advanced test and measurement technology to the market, but also to regard ourselves as a part of the local market, accumulate the wisdom of the local team, grow and break through with our local market, and create a new situation.

Under this new topic, the NI China team will, on the one hand, continue to leverage our expertise and focus to return to core testing and measurement technologies; on the other hand, we will rely on the local team to build new capabilities and perspectives and continue to delve into the local technology ecosystem.

Next, Pan Yu, general manager of NI Innovation Development Center and senior director of strategic development in Asia Pacific, gave a detailed introduction on how the local team perceives the industry, fully combines the growth trends and innovation capabilities of the local market, and conducts local market insights, local decision-making, and local R&D.

In the booming wave of new quality productivity, NI will focus on semiconductors, new energy vehicles and cutting-edge research fields including 6G.

With the launch of WiFi 7 and the transition from 4G to 5G, more frequency bands and modulation methods have led to an exponential increase in testing tasks. The product iteration cycle has been shortened from 3 to 5 years to once a year. In the past, due to the relatively loose time, the laboratory verification test did not have high requirements for test speed or automation, but now the test speed directly affects the progress of product development. The original test method is no longer applicable, and new breakthroughs in hardware technology are needed.

Chen Zeyuan, senior R&D manager of Guangzhou Huizhi Microelectronics Co., Ltd. listed the bottlenecks encountered by traditional testing methods: for example, when measuring servo power, in order to ensure the test consistency of the power meter, it often takes 20ms to read the power once. The heat accumulation caused by different servo times will be quite different. Some engineers often extend the time to read the power to ensure the consistency of the test, in order to read the power after thermal balance, but this will sacrifice efficiency. In addition, when testing the spectrum analyzer, it is often necessary to switch various options. For example, when testing EVM, the time spent switching options and configuring them reaches more than 2s.

Chen Zeyuan Further explained the NI solution used: using fast Power Servo capabilities, even if the power is servoed one or two times, the time difference is controlled within 10ms, the thermal difference is not obvious, and the test consistency can be guaranteed; in terms of program design, the software and hardware are decoupled, and the program architecture of separation of acquisition and calculation is used to allow acquisition to be performed in the instrument module, and the data is transmitted to the controller through the high-speed bus of PXI, and the high-performance controller is used to perform calculations, separating the acquisition and calculation functions to reduce waiting time.

This testing method has brought remarkable results: "Under laboratory conditions, the NI single-line test time (testing a single waveform at a single frequency point, such as ACP, ICQ, etc.) has been reduced from about 10 seconds on the original table to less than one second, and the test efficiency has been increased to 10 times the original. For the previous Full Char test, the workload that took a week to complete can now be completed in about 1 day."