National Instruments at the Embedded Systems Conference the week of April 26 in San Jose took aim at helping designers integrate PXI and CompactPCI instruments into their embedded systems by introducing new board-level backplanes. The new backplanes, previously only available as part of NI’s PXI/CompactPCI and PXI Express chassis, allow OEMs to create their own custom, rugged enclosures that can accommodate PXI, PXI Express, CompactPCI, and CompactPCI Express modules.
The more than 10 new 3U and 6U backplanes offer from 4 to 18 slots. Engineers can design custom installations and enclosures around the backplanes while integrating more than 1500 existing PXI modules-including data-acquisition cards, FPGA-based I/O modules, high-end instruments such as signal generators and RF signal analyzers, and a variety of bus-interface modules including serial, MIL-STD-1553, IEEE 1588, PROFIBUS, and DeviceNet versions.
Designers can use the NI LabView graphical system design platform to design, prototype, and deploy all aspects of their systems, in keeping with what Casey Weltzin, LabView real-time product manager at NI, described as a focus on letting domain experts (in robotics, medical, and energy industries, for example) take a large role in embedded systems designs.
