EDN Names National Instruments CompactRIO an Innovation of the Year Winner
National Instruments today announced that EDN magazine readers and editors selected the NI CompactRIO reconfigurable control and acquisition system based on LabVIEW FPGA technology as a winner of the magazine’s annual Innovation of the Year award in the embedded systems category. The award recognizes how embedded system designers can increase productivity with CompactRIO using high-performance reconfigurable FPGAs and NI LabVIEW graphical development tools to quickly develop custom control and acquisition hardware.
“Innovation is the heart and soul of engineering, and these awards demonstrate that the search for new technologies to improve quality of life is alive and well in the global semiconductor industry,” said EDN Editor in Chief John Dodge. “We applaud all the engineers who are dedicated to nurturing the spirit of discovery and invention.”
The EDN Innovation Awards honor outstanding electronic products – ranging from integrated circuits to test equipment – as well as the creative engineers who invent them. This year’s program featured 13 product categories, each recognizing significant advancements in products and technologies introduced in 2004.
“This prestigious award recognizes the many talented engineers at National Instruments who continue to look beyond evolutionary product design to pioneer new technologies that fundamentally change the way engineers perform the embedded system design process,” said Brian MacCleery, NI industrial control and acquisition product manager.
CompactRIO is an advanced, reconfigurable control and acquisition system designed for applications that require ultrahigh performance and reliability. With CompactRIO, engineers use LabVIEW graphical programming to synthesize their own custom measurement circuitry that rivals the performance and optimization of vendor-defined hardware. Its low-cost embedded architecture combines a real-time embedded processor for stand-alone deterministic operation and communication interfaces; a high-performance reconfigurable I/O (RIO) FPGA core for unlimited flexibility in timing, triggering and synchronization; and industrial hot-swappable I/O modules for direct connection to industrial sensors and actuators.
EDN announced the finalists on Jan. 20, and readers can find complete information about the finalist products on the EDN Web site at www.edn.com. EDN readers, the EDN Editorial Advisory Board, and the EDN editors chose the winners from a list of initial nominations made by electronics industry professionals.
For more information on CompactRIO, readers can visit www.ni.com/crio.
About EDN
EDN, a premier design magazine for the electronics industry, is published by Reed Business Information. Headquartered in Newton, Mass., EDN serves the vital information needs of design engineers and engineering managers worldwide. The EDN franchise includes EDN, EDN Europe, EDN Asia, EDN Australia, EDN China, EDN Japan and EDN.com.
About National Instruments
National Instruments (www.ni.com) is a technology pioneer and leader in virtual instrumentation – a revolutionary concept that has changed the way engineers and scientists in industry, government and academia approach measurement and automation. Leveraging the PC and its related technologies, virtual instrumentation increases productivity and lowers costs through easy-to-integrate software, such as the NI LabVIEW graphical development environment, and modular hardware, such as PXI modules for data acquisition, instrument control and machine vision. Headquartered in Austin, Texas, NI has more than 3,400 employees and direct operations in approximately 40 countries. In 2004, the company sold products to more than 25,000 companies in 90 countries. For the past six years, FORTUNE magazine named NI one of the 100 best companies to work for in America.
