New Pioneer Software from National Instruments Opens LabVIEW FPGA to C Programmers

April 1, 2009 – National Instruments (Nasdaq: NATI) has announced a new programming interface available from the NI Labs virtual research lab that makes it easier for C/C++ developers to take advantage of the NI LabVIEW FPGA Module and NI FPGA-based hardware for embedded control and acquisition applications. With the new NI C Interface to LabVIEW FPGA, developers can use LabVIEW graphical tools to program the field-programmable gate array (FPGA) within NI hardware and choose either LabVIEW or C/C++ tools to program the processor within the system. This new LabVIEW FPGA feature helps engineers and scientists with C expertise implement FPGAs within their designs without the burden of learning hardware design and gives them the option to reuse their existing embedded C code.

The new C Interface to LabVIEW FPGA takes advantage of a reconfigurable I/O (RIO) driver for communication between the processor and FPGA in NI FPGA-based hardware such as NI CompactRIO and NI Single-Board RIO. The NI-RIO driver abstracts the communication between the processor and FPGA so that developers can avoid register-level programming. With the new C Interface to LabVIEW FPGA, engineers and scientists can program the real-time processor on NI FPGA-based hardware using C tools such as NI LabWindows™/CVI, Microsoft Visual Studio or Wind River Workbench and interface to the LabVIEW FPGA code running on the FPGA. Developers can also program the processor using the LabVIEW Real-Time Module, which includes tools for low-level system debugging and precision execution timing for increased flexibility and functionality of deterministic real-time applications.