National Instruments Announces New Suite of Prototyping Hardware to Lower Development Time and Costs

March 3, 2009 – National Instruments (Nasdaq: NATI) has announced a new suite of prototyping hardware that makes it possible for engineers and scientists to prototype industrial and embedded projects faster, reduce time to market and lower development costs. The five new NI CompactRIO reconfigurable chassis feature a Xilinx Virtex-5 field-programmable gate array (FPGA), the largest and fastest FPGA available today in NI hardware. Additionally, the new NI cRIO-9022 controller features a Freescale 533 MHz industrial real-time processor that delivers faster real-time processing for time-critical control applications. This new suite of hardware, along with NI LabVIEW graphical programming tools, is ideal for engineers and start-up companies prototyping industrial and embedded projects within areas such as renewable energy, medical device design and robotics.

With graphical system design tools from NI, engineers can use a single, high-level graphical programming tool with off-the-shelf hardware including FPGAs, processors and I/O to design and prototype a project faster and with lower development costs. This approach makes it possible for small teams of engineers to quickly build a prototype to evaluate and prove the value of their next project.