National Instruments FlexRIO FPGA modules

The NI FlexRIO FPGA modules for PXI Express and a baseband transceiver adapter module are designed to deliver optimised solutions for high-speed signal processing and other automated test and measurement applications. They also offer a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) solution with NI LabVIEW FPGA technology and high-speed, reconfigurable I/O (RIO) for PXI and PXI Express systems.

The NI PXIe-796xR NI FlexRIO FPGA modules feature DSP-focused Xilinx Virtex-5 SXT FPGAs. These FPGAs include optimised DSP blocks to streamline operations such as fast Fourier transforms (FFTs), custom filtering, modulation and demodulation, and other signal processing functions.

The NI PXIe-796xR FPGA modules incorporate the NI-STC3 application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC), which facilitates peer-to-peer streaming to significantly increase test and measurement system throughput. The ASIC powers direct data streaming between multiple NI FlexRIO FPGA modules or between PXI Express digitisers and FPGA modules without sending data through the host processor. For computationally demanding applications, engineers can also spread their algorithms across multiple FPGAs, implementing peer-to-peer streaming from one to another at more than 800 MBps, or in both directions at over 700 MBps per direction, for a total module throughput of more than 1.4 GBps.

Using the NI FlexRIO adapter module, engineers can directly interface FPGAs to numerous types of I/O for measurements across test and measurement applications that require real-time performance or hardware signal processing. The NI 5781 baseband transceiver adapter module incorporates dual 100 MS/s 14-bit analog inputs and dual 100 MS/s 16-bit analog outputs and is suitable for custom baseband interfaces and ultra-high-speed control applications.