FPGA capabilities for distributed I/O

National Instruments has announced new FPGA capabilities for the NI 9144 expansion chassis. By downloading the NI-Industrial Communications for EtherCAT 1.1 driver from ni.com, engineers and scientists can now run LabVIEW FPGA code directly on the NI 9144 chassis to execute custom triggering, inline processing and control within an application.

By embedding hardware-level FPGA logic directly on the expansion I/O, engineers and scientists can offload processing power from the controller and reduce response time by making decisions directly at the node.

The NI 9144 provides the ability to create highly distributed real-time systems that need synchronised control across multiple machines, high-speed waveform measurements and processing at the node and hardware-in-the-loop simulations and feedback. Each expansion chassis has a 2M gate Xilinx Spartan FPGA that can react immediately to measurement data, conduct high-speed analysis and pass the final results back to the programmable automation controller via EtherCAT, an open real-time ethernet protocol. Additionally, the FPGA and I/O data can be synchronised across multiple distributed NI 9144 chassis with less than 100 ns of jitter for highly deterministic performance in time-critical applications.