Compact reconfigurable I/O is aimed at high-volume machines
National Instruments is releasing the new NI cRIO-9072 and cRIO-9074 Compactrio systems for high-volume industrial machines. These new products have an integrated hardware architecture that combines an embedded real-time processor and a reconfigurable FPGA within a single chassis, thereby lowering the cost of Compactrio for OEM applications.
Engineers can design, prototype and deploy the customisable, commercial off-the-shelf hardware systems for embedded machine control and data acquisition systems using the NI’s Labview graphical development environment, which eliminates the need to design custom embedded hardware for high-volume deployment.
The new cRIO-9072 and cRIO-9074 systems extend the family of NI FPGA-based deployment platforms, including PXI, PC and standard Compactrio hardware that share a standard embedded hardware architecture combining a powerful floating-point processor, a reconfigurable FPGA and I/O modules. This standard architecture helps improve the time to market and reliability of machines and embedded devices for machine builders. Using this standard architecture and Labview tools, engineers can rapidly design and prototype industrial monitoring and control machines and embedded devices with flexible, high-performance hardware and quickly deploy to the new cost-optimised cRIO-907x Compactrio systems to reduce deployment costs. Because engineers can reuse the same Labview code during prototyping and deployment, they are able to shorten time to market.
One example of the efficiency engineers can gain with these systems is Sanarus Medical Inc, which used Compactrio to create the Visica2 Treatment System that fights breast cancer by providing office-based cryoablation treatment for biopsy-proven breast fibroadenomas.
Jeff Stevens, principal systems engineer at Sanarus Medical, comments: “The Compactrio embedded system and Labview graphical tools from National Instruments gave us the power to design, prototype and deploy the control system within our Visica2 medical device quickly and beat our time-to-market goals while saving money by eliminating the need for building custom hardware.”
To reduce the cost of Compactrio for high-volume applications, NI engineers designed the cRIO-907x systems as integrated systems, with the embedded real-time processor and FPGA chip on the same pcb rather than multiple PCBs as in traditional Compactrio systems.
The new cRIO-9072 integrated system combines an industrial 266MHz real-time processor and an eight-slot chassis with an embedded, reconfigurable 1M gate FPGA chip. The new NI cRIO-9074 integrated system contains a 400MHz real-time processor and an eight-slot chassis with an embedded, reconfigurable 3M gate FPGA chip.
For more information, visit www.ni.com/compactrio
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