Xilinx's flagship Spartan-6 FPGA, NI's new
Deployed on CompactRIO systems and single-board RIO devices

Through Spartan-6's high-performance hardware acceleration and low-power operation
National Instruments performance improvements and reduction in the size of the NI RIO advanced control/monitoring product portfolio

Xilinx Korea (Country Manager Heung-sik Ahn) August 9, 2011 – Xilinx announced at NIWeek 2011 that National Instruments (NI) has expanded its NI Reconfigurable I/O (RIO) advanced control and monitoring product portfolio by introducing the first and highest-performance multicore NI CompactRIO system and the smallest NI single-board RIO device using Xilinx's flagship Spartan®-6 FPGA.

Through more than 10 years of successful collaboration between Xilinx and NI, over 60 flagship NI RIO products are available that combine LabVIEW system design software with NI RIO hardware systems and embedded Xilinx FPGAs. With the productivity of LabVIEW FPGA, engineers and scientists can rapidly utilize high-performance FPGAs within innovative control, measurement, and test systems without having to learn traditional electronic design automation tools and methods.

With this announcement, the new NI CompactRIO 908x system is now able to provide designers with the highest process capability of the CompactRIO product configuration for monitoring and control applications that demand exceptional performance and robustness. Through the Spartan-6 FPGA, complex signal processing performance and control for applications such as rapid control prototyping, advanced motion control, and machine vision have been enabled.

In addition, the new NI single-board RIO 9605/06 device provides designers with a small and affordable form factor of less than 102.87mm x 96.52mm for high-capacity and manufacturer applications, and offers greater customization and I/O support than previous versions for embedded monitoring and controllers used in industries such as energy and healthcare. The Spartan-6 FPGA and 400MHz processor provide manufacturers with reliability and performance at an affordable price through built-in peripherals such as RS232, CAN, USB, and Ethernet, as well as peripheral add-on capabilities for further customization.

The Xilinx Spartan-6 FPGA is designed for cost-effective applications requiring high-speed connectivity and low-power operation, along with embedded serial transceivers and advanced power management. This device provides various integrated system functions, including a memory controller, digital signal processing (DSP), an endpoint block for PCIe®, and RoHS-compliant lead-free packaging options for eco-friendly electronics.

Eric Starkloff, Vice President of Embedded Systems and Test Marketing at NI, stated, “Xilinx Spartan-6 FPGAs play a critical role in performance enhancement, and customers are looking forward to advanced NI RIO systems. The combination of NI LabVIEW and Xilinx FPGAs not only significantly reduces time-to-market but also provides customers with innovative embedded system design capabilities. We believe that in the near future, NI will provide innovative NI RIO products based on the latest 7 Series FPGAs and the Zynq Embedded Processing Platform, enabling customers to realize their applications with Xilinx.”

Vin Ratford, Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing and Business Development at Xilinx, stated, “NI will continue to drive engineering innovation by providing new high-performance solutions to professionals using the intuitive LabVIEW graphical system design tool. We are very pleased to provide NI customers with an easy-to-use and fast innovation platform across multiple generations of the NI RIO product platform through our long-standing collaboration. We look forward to seeing what engineering challenges customers can solve with next-generation NI products built with Xilinx’s new flagship 28nm FPGA family and the Zynq Scalable Processing Platform.”

NI ROP Advanced Control and Monitoring Platform
NI RIO technology, part of the NI Graphic System Design Platform, combines LabVIEW software with commercial hardware to simplify development and reduce time-to-market when designing advanced control, monitoring, and test systems. NI RIO hardware, including CompactRIO, NI Single-Board RIO, R Series boards, and PXI-based NI FlexRIO, features an architecture with powerful floating-point processors, reconfigurable FPGAs, and modular I/O. All NI RIO hardware components are programmed with LabVIEW and provide engineers with the ability to rapidly generate customer timing, signal processing, and control for I/O without the need for low-level hardware description languages or expertise in board-level design. (For more information on NI cRIO-908x systems, refer to www.ni.com/compactrio and for more information on NI single-board RIO devices, refer to www.ni.com/singleboard )

Xilinx 6 Series FPGA
Since its launch in February 2009, the award-winning Xilinx 6 Series FPGAs have been widely used by customers worldwide in major markets across a diverse range of fields, including aerospace, defense, automotive, industrial, medical science, and wired/wireless communications. To date, Xilinx has sold over 10,000 target design platforms. More than 30 6 Series target design platforms and 70 FMC daughter cards are currently in mass production for Xilinx and members of its global ecosystem (distribution channels and alliance programs).

The Spartan-6 FPGA is designed for cost-effective applications requiring high-speed connectivity and low-power operation, featuring embedded serial transceivers, advanced power management, and a proven 45nm architecture. The Virtex®-6 FPGA family is a high-performance silicon foundation for the Xilinx Target Design Platform, built by combining the Xilinx Target Design Platform with integrated blocks for memory and connectivity support, DSPs including appropriate programming and high-speed transceiver capabilities, to meet customer demands for high bandwidth and performance. (For more information, please refer to www.xilnx.com/product/devices )