National Instruments FlexRIO

The FlexRIO family by National Instruments was created for scientists and engineers requiring the versatility of customized hardware at an affordable price. These products are ideal for applications, such as custom protocol emulation, RADAR/LIDAR, automated test, signals intelligence, accelerator monitoring/control, medical imaging, and communications. The FlexRIO products have features such as huge, user-programmable FPGAs and high-speed digital, analog, and RF I/O. The FlexRIO National Instruments products have two architectures available. One involves modular I/O modules which can be attached to the front of a PXI FPGA Module for FlexRIO and can communicate via a parallel digital interface. The other type of architecture utilizes high-speed serial converters and comes with integrated I/O and Xilinx UltraScale FPGA technology.

One type of module in the FlexRIO NI family is the PXI FPGA Module for FlexRIO. These modules have as many as 132 single-ended I/O lines which can be arranged as 66 differential pairs. The NI FlexRIO FPGA Modules have Virtex or Kintex FPGAs and a PCI, PCI Express Gen1 x 4, PCI Express Gen2 x 4, or a PCI-Express Gen2 x 8 PXI Backplane Link. The FlexRIO FPGA Modules can achieve Peer-to-Peer or P2P data streaming with other modules that support streaming like the PXIe-5668R Analyzer. P2P allows customized frequency and time domain triggering, as well as real-time signal processing for devices that normally need a CPU for further processing. The user should keep in mind that a maximum of 16 P2P streams is supported.

Additionally, the FlexRIO Adapter Modules belong to this series. They can be interfaced with the FlexRIO FPGA Module via a card-edge connector. The user also has the option to create their own customized adapter module with the FlexRIO Adapter Module Development Kit.

Another product type in this series is the Controller for FlexRIO. These models offer a powerful Xilinx FPGA, high-performance I/O, along with an embedded processor enhanced for field deployment. The Controllers for FlexRIO also have 2 GB of onboard DDR3 RAM and several of the models have high-speed serial ports designed for streaming.

There is also the PXI FlexRIO IF Transceivers, which have Xilinx FPGAs and high-speed data converters, making them ideal for applications involving high-performance analog input and real-time signal processing.

If the user would like to utilize the National Instruments FlexRIO system for signal input or output, then it is necessary to attach a FlexRIO Adapter Module to the front of the FlexRIO FPGA Module.