NI Extends CompactRIO Platform With New Systems Built for Higher Volume Deployments

AUSTIN, Texas, May 3, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- National Instruments (Nasdaq: NATI) today announced the release of the new NI cRIO-9075 and cRIO-9076 integrated chassis and controllers, which lower the cost of the NI CompactRIO platform for embedded control and monitoring applications. CompactRIO is powered by reconfigurable I/O (RIO) and NI LabVIEW FPGA technologies and combines an open embedded architecture with a small footprint, extreme ruggedness and a wide breadth of analog, digital, motion and communication I/O modules.

The new integrated systems combine an industrial 400 MHz Freescale real-time processor and four-slot chassis with an embedded, reconfigurable Xilinx Spartan-6 field-programmable gate array (FPGA) for custom timing, control and signal processing capabilities. These NI RIO systems are programmable with LabVIEW graphical system design tools and combine the ease of use of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) systems with the performance of custom hardware. By combining these new low-cost CompactRIO systems with the power and productivity of LabVIEW, engineers and researchers can prototype and deploy custom embedded control and monitoring systems faster and at a lower cost without the need for large engineering design teams. The cRIO-9075 and cRIO-9076 are ideal for embedded control and monitoring applications within industries such as energy, medical and robotics that require a short time to market, advanced control algorithms and high-speed analog and digital I/O.

The new systems extend the NI RIO technology platform offering, which includes CompactRIO, PXI and PC hardware and features a shared standard embedded hardware architecture. By combining the platform's powerful floating-point processors, reconfigurable FPGA and I/O modules, NI RIO systems help improve time to market and lower development costs of machines and embedded devices. The combination of the NI RIO hardware platform with LabVIEW graphical system design software provides design teams with an easily reconfigurable embedded system, eliminating the need to design custom hardware for higher volume deployments and OEM applications. Additionally, engineers and researchers can further reduce time to market and improve system reliability by reusing the same LabVIEW code in between prototyping and deployment phases. Offering a lower cost to the RIO platform, these new cRIO-9075 and cRIO-9076 systems help design teams not only get to market faster but also deploy at higher volumes more cost effectively.

Product specifications for the new systems include the following:

Readers can learn more about the cRIO-9075 and cRIO-9076 controllers at www.ni.com/compactrio.

About National Instruments

National Instruments (www.ni.com) is transforming the way engineers and scientists design, prototype and deploy systems for measurement, automation and embedded applications. NI empowers customers with off-the-shelf software such as NI LabVIEW and modular cost-effective hardware, and sells to a broad base of more than 30,000 different companies worldwide, with its largest customer representing approximately 4 percent of revenue in 2010 and no one industry representing more than 15 percent of revenue. Headquartered in Austin, Texas, NI has approximately 5,500 employees and direct operations in more than 40 countries. For the past 12 years, FORTUNE magazine has named NI one of the 100 best companies to work for in America. Readers can obtain investment information from the company's investor relations department by calling (512) 683-5090, e-mailing [email protected] or visiting www.ni.com/nati.

CompactRIO, LabVIEW, National Instruments, NI and ni.com are trademarks of National Instruments. Other product and company names listed are trademarks or trade names of their respective companies.

SOURCE National Instruments