With a laundry list of design constraints, including a combination of real-time requirements, reliability/durability requests, and functionality and performance needs, it’s not surprising that engineers may find successfully building a competitive embedded solution difficult. To simplify the process, National Instruments developed a rugged, new high-performance embedded system, called CompactRIO, that combines the processing power and flexibility of a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) with the reliability of a real-time processor.

CompactRIO is based on new reconfigurable I/O (RIO) technology, the core functionality of which is provided by a user-programmable FPGA that can be accessed and configured using NI LabVIEW graphical development software. Typically, programming an FPGA requires detailed knowledge of the specific hardware setup as well as the use of a low-level description language such as VHDL, which has a steep learning curve. RIO technology reduces the complexities of embedded hardware and low-level languages to provide simple access to FPGAs. For example, you can use RIO in LabVIEW to set up functionality such as hardware I/O PID, filtering, signal processing, or data transfer through direct memory access (DMA) with only a few function blocks. Similar functionality would take pages of VHDL code to implement. The result is a customizable off-the-shelf embedded system that reduces system development time for embedded design engineers.

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