National Instruments today announced the expansion of its NI FlexRIO product line with multiple forthcoming adapter modules, which provide engineers with application-specific I/O for RF, digital, time-domain and vision inspection systems. The NI FlexRIO family is the industry’s first commercial off-the-shelf solution to provide engineers the flexibility of NI LabVIEW FPGA technology combined with high-speed, instrument-class, reconfigurable and user-defined I/O on the PXI platform.

All NI FlexRIO solutions require two distinct hardware pieces – an I/O-specific adapter module and a PXI-based NI FlexRIO FPGA module, which features a Xilinx Virtex-5 field-programmable gate array (FPGA). With a variety of NI FlexRIO adapter modules, engineers can directly interface FPGAs to new types of I/O for measurements across automated test applications that require real-time performance.

The software-defined, reconfigurable I/O capabilities of NI FlexRIO make it possible for engineers to employ techniques such as in-line signal processing, hardware-in-the-loop control and protocol-aware test for designing and testing many complex electronic devices. National Instruments has already released two NI FlexRIO adapter modules, the NI 6581 100 MHz digital I/O (DIO) adapter module and the NI 6585 200 MHz low-voltage differential signaling (LVDS) DIO module.

www.ni.com