NI Expands FPGA-Enabled NI FlexRIO
Family for PXI With Six New I/O Modules
New Offering Includes Industrys Fastest 16-Bit Converter From
Analog Devices
NEWS RELEASE May 31, 2011 National Instruments today
introduced the expansion of its NI
FlexRIO product line with six new adapter modules
featuring FPGA-based reconfigurable I/O to deliver enhanced
functionality for general-purpose automated test and high-speed
digital communication. The NI FlexRIO family is the industrys first
commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) solution to provide engineers the
flexibility of NI LabVIEW
FPGA technology with high-speed, user-configurable I/O
on the PXI
platform. The new group of adapter modules includes four
general-purpose digitizers, a module for high-speed digital I/O and
the industrys fastest 16-bit analog-to-digital converter (ADC) from
Analog Devices, Inc. (ADI), which is optimized for modulated
communications.
The Analog Devices AD9467 is the fastest 16-bit A/D converter at
250 MS/s available today, said Tom Gratzek, strategic marketing
manager of data converters at Analog Devices. By combining our high
sample rate and resolution with the reconfigurable I/O of NI
FlexRIO, engineers and scientists can now attain unparalleled
flexibility when deploying algorithms onto acquisition hardware,
prototyping communications systems and achieving extremely
high-performance measurements.
All NI FlexRIO solutions require two distinct hardware components
an I/O-specific adapter module and a PXI-based NI FlexRIO FPGA module, which features a
Xilinx Virtex-class field-programmable gate array (FPGA). With 15
different NI FlexRIO adapter modules now available, engineers and
scientists can directly interface FPGAs to a broad variety of I/O
for measurement applications requiring real-time performance,
low-latency processing and reconfigurable behavior.
The six new adapter modules feature the following
specifications:
-- NI 5762: 16-bit, 250 MS/s digitizer,
featuring the AD9467 ADC from Analog Devices
-- NI 6587: 16-ch, 1 Gb/s digital I/O
module for high-speed LVDS interfaces
-- NI 5731: 12-bit, 40 MS/s general-purpose
digitizer adapter module, featuring typical SFDR better than -87
dBc
-- NI 5732: 14-bit, 80 MS/s general-purpose
digitizer adapter module, featuring typical SNR better than 69
dB
-- NI 5733: 16-bit, 120 MS/s
high-resolution digitizer adapter module, featuring 37 MHz of
alias-free bandwidth
-- NI 5734: 16-bit, 120 MS/s, quad-channel,
high-resolution digitizer adapter module
The modules also integrate with the new NI FlexRIO Instrument Development
Library, a collection of LabVIEW host and FPGA code,
designed to provide capabilities commonly found in instruments such
as acquisition engines, DRAM interfaces and trigger logic, along
with the associated host APIs. Additionally, the new NI-573xR
Example Instrument Driver builds on the code from the Instrument
Development Library to create a default FPGA personality and
familiar host API for using an NI 573x adapter module as a basic
digitizer. Together, these tools decrease the time to first
measurement. Both software components are available for download
through ni.com/labs.
Unlike other user-programmable FPGA hardware, NI FlexRIO FPGAs can be
programmed with LabVIEW
graphical system design software and the LabVIEW FPGA
Module. This approach helps domain experts to target their
applications to FPGAs without requiring VHDL knowledge, while still
providing an interface to import existing VHDL code directly into
LabVIEW FPGA.
Readers can learn more about the new NI FlexRIO adapter modules by
visiting www.ni.com/flexrio.
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