NI FlexRIO hardware provides flexible, customizable I/O for NI LabVIEW FPGA. It features two parts: NI FlexRIO field-programmable gate array (FPGA) modules for PXI and PXI Express and NI FlexRIO adapter modules that provide high-performance analog and digital I/O. Together, they form a reconfigurable instrument that is programmable with LabVIEW FPGA software.
The NI PXIe-7966R FPGA module features a DSP-focused Virtex-5 SX95T FPGA and 512 MB of onboard DDR2 DRAM. This FPGA incorporates 640 DSP slices that you can use to implement digital filters, custom signal processing, and fast Fourier transform (FFT) logic, all of which are commonly found on analog FPGA-based instruments. In addition, the theoretical onboard DRAM throughput of 3.2 GB/s is necessary when operating on large data sets with the highest-performance adapter modules.
The NI PXIe-7966R FlexRIO FPGA module is identical to the NI PXIe-7965R except for the speed grade of the FPGA. They both feature the same size Virtex-5 SX95T FPGA, though the NI PXIe-7966R has a faster speed grade (-2) compared to the NI PXIe-7965R (-1). This is necessary to meet the timing requirements of future, high-performance adapter modules being developed by NI that cannot be met by the current NI PXIe-7965R. All NI FlexRIO FPGA modules other than the NI PXIe-7965R--both PXI and PXI Express--are able to meet the timing requirements necessary for these future adapter modules due to their smaller size and thus smaller routing delays. This faster speed grade has the added potential benefit of wider timing margins, which could reduce compile times for large, high-speed designs.
High-Performance Peer-to-Peer Streaming
Peer-to-peer streaming is a new technology from NI that enables direct data streaming among multiple FPGA modules, or between select PXI Express modular instruments and FPGA modules, without sending data back to the host processor. The new NI-STC3 application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) provides this peer-to-peer data streaming at rates exceeding 800 MB/s (aggregate) on up to 16 separate streams. With this powerful feature, you can add FPGA capabilities to high-performance NI digitizers with NIST-traceable calibration or expand your FPGA algorithms across multiple FPGAs for computationally demanding applications.
Build Your Own I/O for LabVIEW FPGA
Use the NI FlexRIO Adapter MDK to build custom I/O to meet your exact application needs. The NI FlexRIO card edge connector offers direct access to the raw digital I/O pins of the FPGA. Each pin is capable of low-voltage differential signaling (LVDS) rates up to 1 Gbit/s and single-ended rates up to 400 Mbit/s.
