National Instruments Introduces PCI Express-Based Multifunction I/O for LabVIEW FPGA

July 22, 2009 – National Instruments has announced four new R Series multifunction RIO boards for PCI Express that give engineers and scientists the benefits of field-programmable gate array (FPGA) technology in a widely adopted form factor. The boards deliver exceptional performance and value by combining a Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGA, 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 custom data acquisition, high-speed control, digital communications protocols, sensor simulation, hardware-in-the-loop and signal processing applications.

Engineers and scientists can achieve 16-bit analogue input sampling rates up to 200 kS/s per channel with the NI PCIe-7841R and NI PCIe-7842R and sampling rates up to 750 kS/s per channel with the NI PCIe-7851R and NI PCIe-7852R. Because they are based on the PCI Express bus, the new R Series boards take advantage of dedicated bandwidth per device for reliable, high-speed data streaming. The boards also offer DMA channels for streaming data to and from the FPGA at more than 100 MB/s per device without significantly impacting processor resources.