National Instruments Aust & NZ has expanded 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.
A commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) solution, the NI FlexRIO family provides 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 high-speed digital I/O module and a high-speed 16-bit analogue-to-digital converter (ADC) from Analog Devices, Inc. (ADI), which is optimised for modulated communications.
Specifications of the 6 new FPGA-enabled adapter modules:
- 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
According to Tom Gratzek, strategic marketing manager of data converters at Analog Devices, by combining their high sample rate and resolution with the reconfigurable I/O modules of NI FlexRIO, users 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 behaviour.
Key features of the NI FlexRIO adapter modules:
- Integrate with the new NI FlexRIO Instrument Development Library
- 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
- NI FlexRIO FPGAs can be programmed with LabVIEW graphical system design software and the LabVIEW FPGA module
- Helps domain experts target their applications to FPGAs without requiring VHDL knowledge
