National Instruments Introduces Largest Virtex-5 LabVIEW FPGA Targets

National Instruments Introduces Largest Virtex-5 LabVIEW FPGA Targets

New R Series I/O Modules Offer Increased Onboard Processing for Data Acquisition and Control Applications

NEWS RELEASE – Oct. 8, 2008 – National Instruments today announced two new R Series I/O modules for the PXI platform to give design, control and test engineers increased onboard processing. These new modules provide engineers and scientists with commercial off-the-shelf hardware that can be graphically programmed with the NI LabVIEW FPGA Module to perform custom onboard processing for inline data analysis and deterministic I/O control for applications that require specialized timing and triggering.

With the greater capacity in field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), engineers can increase the amount of embedded logic possible for R Series modules and implement such complex functionality as control algorithms, custom processing and digital communication protocols. For control applications, engineers can increase the number of simultaneous control loops and the complexity of their control applications. In dynamic test applications, engineers can increase test coverage by using FPGAs to provide real-time response signals to a device under test (DUT). In addition, engineers can use R Series hardware in their data acquisition systems to implement custom filtering, frequency domain analysis and data reduction.

The NI PXI-7853R features the Xilinx Virtex-5 LX85 FPGA with more than an 80 percent increase in logic resources over a 3 million gate FPGA for increased onboard processing. The NI PXI-7854R features an even larger FPGA, with the Virtex-5 LX110 that has almost 2.5 times the logic resources of a 3 million gate FPGA. Engineers and scientists can use these larger FPGAs to embed more graphical LabVIEW code, without having any prior knowledge of digital design or hardware description languages. In addition to increased LabVIEW code capacity, Virtex-5 FPGAs feature a six-input lookup table (LUT) architecture for substantially improved resource utilization as well as digital signal processing (DSP) slices that make it possible for users to implement more complex DSP at faster rates.

The PXI-7853R and PXI-7854R have eight analog inputs with independent sampling rates up to 750 kHz and eight analog outputs with independent update rates up to 1 MHz. Both devices also offer 96 digital lines configurable as inputs, outputs, counters or custom logic at rates up to 40 MHz.

Readers can visit www.ni.com/rseries for more information, including data sheets, webcasts and white papers, about the new R Series modules. ■