jonaarch, Your question is pretty broad, so if you can provide some details in what you are looking along the lines of an application, I might be able to help.
What I can do is tell you that our modular instrumentation and data acquisition hardware and LabVIEW are used throughout the design cycle. In the early stages of design, an engineer who is designing analog circuitry would use an EDA tool like PSpice to design and simulate his circuit. Then he would build a prototype and then test it using LabVIEW. Once done testing in LabVIEW, he can import his simulation data and compare the simulation and test results in the same environment. Additionally, once he is finished testing the prototype, he send the same hardware and software to the validation and characterization engineer who can then move the same tools even further down the design chain. This is only a quick example for electrical design, we have design tool connectivity in other spaces such as Control Design, Mathematics, Embedded Software Design, and Mechanical design as well. I would invite you to either contact me or visit www.ni.com/design for more information.
