Product Life Cycle

National Instruments strives to develop products that minimize the amount of raw materials and energy used, thus decreasing the cost of customer applications. This commitment is evident in the NI approach of offering hardware platforms that reduce waste and energy use over the life of the product, extend product life, and facilitate reuse. Challenges to the product design process include maintaining compliance with evolving environmental legislation and the difficulty in gathering material content information for components. Reasons for the difficulty include suppliers not having the requested data, data confidentiality, and the length of time it takes to move through the supply chain.

Virtual Instrumentation
A key strategy to reduce waste, cost, energy use, and carbon footprint is the NI approach of offering software-defined, modular hardware platforms, also known as virtual instrumentation. With modular hardware platforms, customers can select the exact instruments they need for their applications and define the functionality of the instruments through the software.

This approach greatly reduces the cost and energy consumption of customer applications because all the components share the same chassis and high-performance CPU. This eliminates the need for redundant chassis, processors, displays, and other components. This model ensures that NI platforms can adapt to changing needs and new applications, providing a single platform to last through multiple generations of applications.

Management of Critical Substances
National Instruments is committed to producing environmentally friendly products as part of the NI Hazardous Substance Reduction initiative, a voluntary program modeled after the European Union Restriction of the Use of Certain Hazardous Substances (RoHS) directive. As part of this commitment, in 2010 NI invested in a system for collecting information on environmentally sensitive materials in NI products.

RoHS Compliance
This directive restricts the use of harmful substances such as lead, mercury, and cadmium in products. It applies to 11 categories of electrical and electronic equipment but as of today excludes products in Category 9, Monitoring and Control Instruments, under which NI products fall. NI voluntarily complies with the directive.

NI began offering RoHS-compliant products in September 2005. NI manufacturing and engineering teams continually work to adapt products to use RoHS-compliant components and manufacturing processes.

The move to RoHS-compliant products is a significant effort because it impacts nearly every step in the supply chain. Therefore, NI will complete this transition over a progressive timeline. Through continued efforts to better the environment and exceed regulatory requirements, more than 70 percent of NI products met RoHS requirements in 2010. For more information about NI compliance with RoHS, refer to the RoHS section of this report.

Registration, Evaluation, Authorization, and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH)
In 2006, the European Parliament and the Council adopted Regulation (EC) No 1907/2006 on the Registration, Evaluation, Authorization, and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH). One of the regulation's primary objectives is to protect the environment from harmful substances.

The scope of the REACH regulation differs from RoHS in that REACH is not limited to electrical and electronic equipment. REACH requires manufacturers and importers of substances and preparations to register the substance or preparation before placing it on the market if it meets certain criteria.

As a producer of articles – not substances or preparations – NI is not required to register any substances or preparations. NI does not produce or import chemical substances in excess of 1 tonne per year, and NI products do not release any substances into the environment during normal and foreseeable conditions of use.

NI is required to comply with downstream users' obligations. To accommodate this, NI is working closely with its supply chain as new substances are added to the candidate list. A list of NI products that contain substances of very high concern (SVHCs) in concentrations greater than 0.1 percent wt/wt can be found here. For additional information, visit the REACH section of this report.

Conflict Minerals Trade Act
In 2010 the U.S. Congress passed the Conflict Minerals Trade Act as part of the Dodd-Frank Financial Reform legislation. The law’s aim is to curb violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and surrounding regions by restricting the use of certain minerals originating in rebel-controlled mines. These substances include the base minerals for gold, tantalum, tin, and tungsten.

Most NI products contain at least one of these substances and fall into the scope of the law’s requirements, which state that any U.S. company that uses these minerals for the functionality or production of their product(s) will be required to disclose details on the origin of these substances in their annual report to the SEC. NI is obligated to begin disclosing this information for fiscal year 2012. To meet the law's obligations, NI will work with its supply chain in 2011 and 2012 to understand the origin of these minerals used in NI products.