NI introduces C Interface to Labview FPGA

National Instruments's (NI's) novel programming interface helps C/C++ developers to use the NI Labview FPGA module and NI FPGA-based hardware for embedded control and acquisition applications.

With the NI C Interface to Labview FPGA, developers can use Labview graphical tools to program the FPGA within NI hardware and choose either Labview or C/C++ tools to program the processor within the system.

The Labview FPGA feature helps engineers and scientists with C expertise to implement FPGAs within their designs, without having to learn hardware design.

It also gives them the option to reuse their existing embedded C code.

The C Interface to Labview FPGA takes advantage of a reconfigurable I/O (RIO) driver for communication between the processor and FPGA in NI FPGA-based hardware, such as the NI CompactRIO and the NI Single-Board RIO.

The NI-RIO driver abstracts the communication between the processor and the FPGA so that developers can avoid register-level programming.

With the interface, engineers and scientists can program the real-time processor on NI FPGA-based hardware using C tools such as NI Labwindows/CVI, Microsoft Visual Studio or the Wind River Workbench; they can then interface to the Labview FPGA code running on the FPGA.

Developers can also program the processor using the Labview real-time module, which includes tools for low-level system debugging and precision execution timing for increased flexibility and functionality of deterministic real-time applications.

Additionally, the C Interface to Labview FPGA is claimed to make it possible for developers to use C/C++ to program the real-time processor of a PXI system or a processor on a PC running Microsoft Windows and interface to the Labview FPGA code running on an NI FlexRIO or a PXI/Compact PCI/PCI NI R Series FPGA I/O device.

The NI-RIO driver provides single-point transfer and DMA streaming functionality, as well as interrupt-based communication between the processor and the embedded FPGA within the NI hardware.

According to the company, the Labview FPGA module simplifies FPGA programming by offering an intuitive development environment that abstracts the VHDL code required and opens up FPGA programming to all engineers, regardless of their hardware design experience.

The graphical dataflow approach in the module also makes it suitable for depicting the inherent parallelism of FPGAs.

Additionally, developers can accelerate their application development with more than 200 pre-built FPGA intellectual property (IP) blocks available in the Labview FPGA module, select Labview toolkits and on the company's website.

The evaluation kit includes an NI Single-Board RIO embedded device and step-by-step tutorials for building FPGA-based applications.

The interface is available from the NI Labs virtual research laboratory.

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