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NI releases IP blocks for Labview FPGA module

A National Instruments product story
Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team Aug 4, 2009

National Instruments (NI) has announced the availability of free communications intellectual-property (IP) blocks for the NI Labview field-programmable gate array (FPGA) module.

These make it possible to add serial peripheral interface (SPI) and inter-integrated circuit (I2C) devices to embedded systems developed on NI reconfigurable input/output (RIO) hardware platforms.

The company has also been working with component suppliers such as Analog Devices to develop drivers for common components such as micro-electromechanical system (MEMS) sensors so that engineers and scientists can integrate accelerometers, gyroscopes, temperature and other sensors into their embedded systems.

Digital embedded sensors, which are used in a number of applications, ranging from automobiles to medical devices and consumer electronics, provide measurement feedback that is said to be important to overall system performance.

Examples include: sensors for monitoring environmental conditions such as temperature, humidity and pressure; ultrasonic detectors for medical devices or sensors such as light detection and ranging (LIDAR); and inertial measurement unit (IMU) devices for mobile robotics.

Using Labview FPGA IP, engineers and scientists can incorporate devices based on SPI and I2C, two of the most widely used types of embedded digital communication protocols, with NI RIO hardware, including the CompactRIO programmable automation controller (PAC), NI single-board RIO embedded devices and R-series multifunction RIO devices.

NI RIO hardware platforms, which share an architecture composed of a real-time processor, an FPGA and I/O modules, are suitable for applications that need the reliability of validated off-the-shelf hardware and the flexibility of custom hardware and high-performance I/O capabilities.

Engineers and scientists with limited or no hardware design experience can program the FPGA on NI RIO platforms using the Labview FPGA module, which provides a graphical programming tool that abstracts the VHDL code used to configure the FPGA.

Labview is also intended to make it easy to build and modify custom communication IP and inline digital processing in addition to integrating a range of analogue and digital signals and sensors for future devices.

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