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R Series Rio boards provide benefits of FPGA

A National Instruments product story
Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team Jul 24, 2009

National Instruments has announced four R Series multifunction Rio boards for PCI Express.

These boards give engineers and scientists the benefits of field-programmable gate array (FPGA) technology in a widely adopted form factor.

The boards combine a Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGA, eight analogue inputs, eight analogue outputs and 96 digital I/O lines on a single board.

Using the NI Labview FPGA Module, engineers and scientists can program the onboard FPGA to create custom measurement hardware for custom data acquisition, high-speed control, digital communications protocols, sensor simulation, hardware-in-the-loop and signal-processing applications.

Engineers and scientists can achieve 16-bit analogue input sampling rates up to 200kS/s per channel with the NI PCIe-7841R and NI PCIe-7842R and sampling rates up to 750kS/s per channel with the NI PCIe-7851R and NI PCIe-7852R.

Because they are based on the PCI Express bus, the new R Series boards take advantage of dedicated bandwidth per device for reliable, high-speed data streaming.

The boards also offer DMA channels for streaming data to and from the FPGA at more than 100 MB/s per device without significantly impacting processor resources.

John Hanks, vice-president of industrial and embedded product lines at National Instruments, said: 'The new NI R Series hardware based on Labview FPGA gives developers an easy way to take advantage of the latest parallel, inline computing and data-streaming capabilities for demanding measurement and control applications.'
In addition to the PC-based benefits, the new R Series boards give engineers and scientists the high-speed processing power provided by FPGAs.

The boards are equipped with either a Virtex-5 LX30 or Virtex-5 LX50 FPGA, both of which offer increased performance with more efficient logic resource use and faster logic execution rates.

R Series boards with Virtex-5 FPGAs also deliver twice the processing power of previous generation Virtex-II-equipped R Series boards at the same price.

Engineers and scientists with limited or no hardware-design experience can easily program the FPGA on R Series boards using the Labview FPGA Module, which abstracts the VHDL code used to configure the FPGA.

Labview also provides pre-built function blocks and other code-optimisation techniques to speed up application development.

For engineers and scientists that program in C, the recently released NI C Interface to Labview FPGA makes it possible for them to integrate new or existing C applications with NI FPGA hardware programmed with the Labview FPGA Module.

With integrated FPGA technology, R Series multifunction Rio boards can be configured to meet numerous application needs such as custom data-acquisition, sensor simulation and high-performance control.

With the wide availability and decreasing costs of standard desktop PCs, engineers, scientists and OEMs can combine a PC and a new PCI Express R Series board to create powerful, cost-optimised custom hardware systems, including a high-speed control system with eight 750kHz proportional integral derivative (PID) loops running in parallel, a custom digital protocol interface for communicating with or characterising a device under test, or a sensor simulation system for hardware-in-the-loop testing.

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