NI Releases New CompactRIO Systems for High-Volume Machines and Devices

The new cRIO-9072 and cRIO-9074 systems extend the family of NI FPGA-based deployment platforms, including PXI, PC and standard CompactRIO hardware that share a standard embedded hardware architecture combining a powerful floating-point processor, a reconfigurable FPGA and I/O modules. This standard architecture helps improve the time to market and reliability of machines and embedded devices for machine builders. Using this standard architecture and LabVIEW tools, engineers can rapidly design and prototype industrial monitoring and control machines and embedded devices with flexible, high-performance hardware and quickly deploy to the new cost-optimised cRIO-907x CompactRIO systems to reduce deployment costs. Because engineers can reuse the same LabVIEW code during prototyping and deployment, they are able to shorten time to market and increase machine reliability.

One example of the efficiency engineers can gain with these systems is Sanarus Medical Inc., which used CompactRIO to create the Visica2 Treatment System that fights breast cancer by providing office-based cryoablation treatment for biopsy-proven breast fibroadenomas. The Visica2 system uses cryoablation to destroy targeted fibroadenomas through a 3 mm incision, under ultrasound guidance, without requiring sutures or general anesthesia to offer women a minimally invasive alternative to the standard surgical treatment for such tumors.

“The CompactRIO embedded system and LabVIEW graphical tools from National Instruments gave us the power to design, prototype and deploy the control system within our Visica2 medical device quickly and beat our time-to-market goals while saving money by eliminating the need for building custom hardware,” said Jeff Stevens, Principal Systems Engineer at Sanarus Medical. “The standard embedded RIO [reconfiguarable I/O] architecture and new low-cost hardware like the cRIO-907x systems help us even further by allowing us to quickly move to lower-cost hardware when deploying our machines at high volume without having to redesign software or start over from scratch with a new design.”

To reduce the cost of CompactRIO for high-volume applications, NI engineers designed the new cRIO-907x systems as integrated systems, with the embedded real-time processor and FPGA chip on the same printed circuit board (PCB) rather than multiple PCBs as in traditional CompactRIO systems. The new cRIO-9072 integrated system combines an industrial 266 MHz real-time processor and an eight-slot chassis with an embedded, reconfigurable 1M gate FPGA chip. The new NI cRIO-9074 integrated system contains a 400 MHz real-time processor and an 8-slot chassis with an embedded, reconfigurable 3M gate FPGA chip.