National Instruments LabVIEW 8 Wins EDN Innovation of the Year Award.

AUSTIN, Texas -- National Instruments (Nasdaq:NATI) LabVIEW 8, the latest version of the NI LabVIEW graphical development platform for design, control and test, received an EDN Innovation of the Year Award in the software category. This honor acknowledges the considerable engineering effort behind LabVIEW 8 and recognizes the development environment's significant role as a design tool.

To address the growing need for design, control and test systems based on industry trends, LabVIEW 8 introduces distributed intelligence -- a powerful suite of capabilities empowering engineers and scientists to easily design, distribute and synchronize intelligent devices and systems through graphical development. With distributed intelligence, engineers and scientists now have the tools they need to use new processing power and distributed systems at their full potential.

Engineers can also use the new LabVIEW Project, an environment for managing large applications and team development. They can organize and manage their source files, including LabVIEW and third-party code; seamlessly check code in and out of industry-standard source code control packages; and easily manage hardware targets and resources from the same window, which dramatically differentiates LabVIEW graphical development from traditional programming tools for designing test and control applications.

"As our winners demonstrate again this year, innovation is evident everywhere from components and ICs to software and the most complex test gear," stated EDN editor in chief Maury Wright. "I feel privileged to work in electronics and witness engineers that are perpetually driven to innovate. It is their determination and creativity that we honor when we choose the best of the best to take home EDN Innovation award."

The EDN Innovation Awards recognize the most significant technological advances of the past year in several categories. The magazine's audience of engineers and engineering managers, as well as EDN's editorial staff and Editorial Advisory Board, voted online for the winners from finalists selected by EDN editors. The awards were presented in conjunction with the Embedded Systems Conference in San Jose, Calif., held April 2-4. For more information, readers can visit www.edn.com.

About EDN

Known as the "voice of the engineer," Waltham, Mass.-based EDN serves the vital information needs of design engineering managers worldwide. The EDN franchise includes EDN, EDN Europe, EDN Asia, EDN Australia, EDN China, EDN Japan and EDN.com.

About National Instruments

For 30 years, National Instruments (www.ni.com) has been a technology pioneer and leader in virtual instrumentation -- a revolutionary concept that has changed the way engineers and scientists in industry, government and academia approach measurement and automation. Leveraging PCs and commercial technologies, virtual instrumentation increases productivity and lowers costs for test, control and design applications through easy-to-integrate software, such as NI LabVIEW, and modular measurement and control hardware for PXI, PCI, PCI Express, USB and Ethernet. Headquartered in Austin, Texas, NI has more than 3,800 employees and direct operations in nearly 40 countries. For the past seven years, FORTUNE magazine has named NI one of the 100 best companies to work for in America. Readers can obtain investment information from the company's investor relations department by calling 512-683-5090, e-mailing [e-mail] or visiting www.ni.com/nati.

LabVIEW, National Instruments, NI and ni.com are trademarks of National Instruments. Other product and company names listed are trademarks or trade names of their respective companies.