A Rapid Prototyping Tool for Embedded

Laboratory Virtual Instrumentation and Engineering Workbench (LabVIEW) is a graphical programming tool based on the dataflow language G. Recently, runtime support for a hard real-time environment has become available for LabVIEW, which makes it an option for embedded systems prototyping. Due to its characteristics, the environment presents itself as an ideal tool for both the design and implementation of embedded software. In this paper, the authors study the design and implementation of embedded software by using G as the specification language and the LabVIEWRT real-time platform. One of the main advantages of this approach is that the environment leads itself to a very smooth transition from design to implementation, allowing for powerful cosimulation strategies (e.g., hardware in the loop, runtime modeling).