SANTA CLARA, Calif., – August 27, 2003 – More than 1,550 customers from around the world attended NIWeek, National Instruments annual technical conference and exhibition in Austin, Texas, August 13-15, 2003. During the three-day event, SigmaQuest, a leader in product performance intelligence, was selected to present challenges facing the test industry today and propose common standards needed. NI major account customers in attendance gathered to discuss the issues.

Al Alaverdi, SigmaQuest Vice President of Technology, presented “Emerging Technologies and Trends” to the group of leading OEMs, manufacturers and academia. Alaverdi addressed the obstacles many of the group confront while designing, developing, and servicing products in global environments. Alaverdi spoke of the importance of investing in technologies that allow dispersed organizations and companies to integrate data sources regardless of hardware and software infrastructures that can vary widely from site to site. Drawing from years of experience developing such systems, Alaverdi stated, “Decreasing time to volume, lowering manufacturing costs, and improving quality to protect brand identify are critical in today’s time pressured markets. Companies that can link together global teams – regardless of the company for which the team members work – to collaborate on product quality and design will be the winners.”

On the exhibition floor, SigmaQuest™ demonstrated the seamless integration of SigmaQuestTM SigmaSure with National Instruments LabVIEW™ 7.0 Express and the newly released TestStand™ 3.0. These demonstrations showed how engineers can easily build complete systems for collecting test data from factories anywhere in the world and aggregating and analyzing the data in real-time in one or many locations.

“This successful event in Austin gives our customers, National Instruments, and SigmaQuest team a tremendous boost,” Nader Fathi, SigmaQuest CEO, said. “SigmaQuest was able to demonstrate the technological capabilities of SigmaSure at this year’s NIWeek, in collaboration with NI. The exhibit captured the practical application of the SigmaSure with NI virtual instrumentation technology to solve the most challenging problems in the global test industry. The integration of SigmaSure with latest releases of NI LabVIEW and NI TestStand provide an enterprise solution that customers can use today in their global environments.”

About National Instruments

National Instruments is a technology pioneer and leader in virtual instrumentation -- a revolutionary concept that has changed the way engineers and scientists approach measurement and automation. Leveraging the PC and its related technologies, virtual instrumentation increases productivity and lowers costs for customers worldwide through easy-to-integrate software, such as the NI LabVIEW graphical development environment, and modular hardware, such as PXI modules for data acquisition, instrument control and machine vision. Headquartered in Austin, Texas, NI has more than 3,000 employees and direct operations in 40 countries. In 2002, the company sold products to more than 25,000 different companies in more than 80 countries around the world. For the past four consecutive years, FORTUNE magazine has named NI one of the 100 best companies to work for in America.

About SigmaQuest

SigmaQuest (www.sigmaquest.com), a leader in product performance intelligence, is the first to enable global visibility to test and quality data for electronic systems manufacturing. The company's revolutionary "any-data, any-tester, anywhere" technology supports automated test and quality data management and analysis across multiple geographies, test equipment suppliers, and extended supply chain members. Original equipment manufacturers and contract manufacturers achieve lower materials costs, lower manufacturing and support costs, and faster time to revenue.