Analytical instruments are currently undergoing metamorphic changes to keep pace with the dynamic industrial needs, myriad regulations and compliance requirements. As a part of this transformation, embedded software has acquired an important and growing role in translating the technological innovations in analytical instrument industry.
This paper analyzes the evolution and future trends in software technologies, the architectures and processes followed for design and development of analytical instruments, with special focus on life science and chemical analysis instruments.
Developing reliable software under time to market pressures with increasing functionality and ever decreasing budgets is a challenge. A proven instrument software architecture on a standard technology platform helps significantly reduce development risks. Apart from the analysis of some standard software architectures used in this industry, resilience of these architectures with respect to future enhancements and maintenance would also be discussed.
Increasingly, instruments are no longer being used in isolation. Data collection, analysis and collaboration of multiple instruments are driving external communication interfaces for analytical instruments, allowing centralized software to control, collaborate, collect data, analyze and do consolidated reporting. This paper focuses on external communication interfaces that play a big role in today’s instrument automation.
Apart from technologies and architecture, an important factor of instrument product development is the process followed for design and development of the software. Routinely instrument software code now exceeds over 100K lines of code and some approaching 1M lines. Complexity of this nature needs to be managed by a formal software development process with adequate documentation. Current trends in instrument software development processes and the best practices followed in the industry are also presented in the paper.
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