National Instruments expanded its NI FlexRIO product line with FPGA modules for PXI Express and a baseband transceiver adapter module for high-speed signal processing and other automated test and measurement applications.
The NI PXIe-796xR NI FlexRIO FPGA modules feature DSP-focused Xilinx Virtex-5 SXT FPGAs, which include DSP blocks to streamline operations, such as fast Fourier transforms (FFTs), custom filtering, modulation and demodulation and other signal-processing functions. The FPGA modules incorporate the NI-STC3 application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC), which 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 MB/s, or in both directions at over 700 MB/s per direction, for a total module throughput of more than 1.4 GB/s.
The NI FlexRIO adapter module allows engineers to 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 analogue inputs and dual 100 MS/s 16-bit analogue outputs and is ideal for custom baseband interfaces and ultra-high-speed control applications.