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Multifunction RIO boards with NI LabVIEW FPGA module

National Instruments has unveiled four R Series multifunction RIO boards for PCI Express. The boards offer engineers and scientists the benefits of FPGA (field-programmable gate array) technology in a widely adopted form factor and deliver high performance by combining 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 digital communications protocols, hardware-in-the-loop and signal processing applications. Engineers and scientists with limited or no hardware design experience can program the FPGA on these boards using the LabVIEW FPGA module, which abstracts the VHDL code that is used to configure the FPGA. It is possible to achieve 16bit analogue input sampling rates of up to 200ksamples/s per channel with the NI PCIe-7841R and NI PCIe-7842R and sampling rates of up to 750ksamples/s per channel with the NI PCIe-7851R and NI PCIe-7852R. The boards offer DMA channels for streaming data to and from the FPGA at more than 100Mbyte/s per device without significantly impacting processor resources.

The boards are equipped with either a Virtex-5 LX30 or Virtex-5 LX50 FPGA, both of which offer increased performance with efficient logic resource use and faster logic execution rates. The boards with Virtex-5 FPGAs deliver better processing power. The LabVIEW FPGA module provides pre-built function blocks and other code optimisation techniques to expedite application development. For engineers and scientists who program in C, the NI C Interface to LabVIEW FPGA allows them to integrate new or existing C applications with NI FPGA hardware programmed with the LabVIEW FPGA module. With integrated FPGA technology, the multifunction RIO boards can be configured to meet numerous application requirements, such as custom data acquisition, sensor simulation and high-performance control. Scientists and OEMs can combine a PC and the R Series boards to create cost-optimised custom hardware systems.