National Instruments

National Instruments' R Series intelligent data acquisition (DAQ) devices use FPGA technology so you can create custom, reconfigurable systems with onboard processing. NI upgraded the FPGA chips that make this flexibility possible in the latest generation of R Series boards. Previous generation R Series boards use the Xilinx Virtex-II FPGA chips, but the PXI-7841R, PXI-7842R, PXI-7851R, and PXI-7852R boards feature the new, and much improved, Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGA chips.

There are many important architectural differences in the new design, such as six-input look up tables (LUTs), a diagonally symmetric interconnect pattern, and special DSP48E slices for complex math. Additionally, all chips are processed using a 65 nm lithographic process. This white paper offers an in-depth examination of these improvements.