System shrinkage

National Instruments has released two new versions of its popular CompactRIO for use in high-volume applications.

To reduce the cost of CompactRIO, 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 cRIO-9072 integrated system combines an industrial 266MHz real-time processor and an eight-slot chassis with an embedded, reconfigurable 1Mgate FPGA chip. The NI cRIO-9074 integrated system contains a 400MHz real-time processor and an 8-slot chassis with an embedded, reconfigurable 2Mgate FPGA chip.

Engineers can design, prototype and deploy the customisable systems for embedded machine control and data acquisition systems using the National Instruments LabVIEW graphical development environment, eliminating the need for spending unnecessary time and money designing custom embedded hardware for high-volume deployment.

Sanarus Medical used CompactRIO to create its 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 anaesthesia to offer women a minimally invasive alternative to the standard surgical treatment for such tumours.

'The CompactRIO embedded system and LabVIEW graphical tools 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 [reconfigurable 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,' he added.