National Instruments,
Freescale Semiconductor
and Wind River are working
together to help engineers simplify
embedded design, including
industrial control and monitoring,
with the release of the latest highperformance,
real-time controller
for the NI CompactRIO platform.
The National Instruments cRIO-
9014 controller is based on the
Freescale MPC5200 processor built
on Power ArchitectureT
technology and the Wind River
VxWorks real-time operating
system (RTOS) to deliver the
processing speed, memory and
storage required for a variety of
demanding embedded and
industrial applications such as
high-speed machine control,
machine monitoring/protection, invehicle
data logging and
embedded device prototyping.
The cRIO-9014 controller marks
the second time the companies are
working together on the
CompactRIO platform. The
companies previously worked
together on the National
Instruments cRIO-9012 controller
introduced in November 2006. This
project illustrates the companies'
ongoing, strategic dedication to
helping engineers streamline
embedded system development
through graphical system design,
which integrates a single, open
software development platform
with commercial off-the-shelf
(COTS) programmable hardware
for quickly designing, prototyping
and deploying embedded systems.
Combining key technologies from
the three companies, the new
cRIO-9014 controller makes
CompactRIO an ideal industrial
control and monitoring platform
that blends capabilities found
individually in PLCs, industrial PCs,
single-board devices and custom
hardware. Traditionally, engineers
designing industrial machines or
embedded control systems were
forced to use multiple hardware
and software tools to perform
complex algorithms, data logging
and custom signal processing. The
CompactRIO programmable
automation controller (PAC)
platform takes advantage of the
reliability of the VxWorks RTOS and
the MPC5200 industrial floatingpoint
processor in the new
controller, and the customisation of
the Xilinx FPGA chipset in the
chassis, to deliver the ruggedness
and reliability of a PLC, the
openness and power of industrial
or single-board computers and the
flexibility and performance of
custom hardware. In addition, the
CompactRIO embedded system
can be programmed with a single,
intuitive graphical tool, National
Instruments LabVIEW, which makes
it easy for domain experts to
develop and deploy custom, highperformance
industrial embedded
solutions. "The CompactRIO
embedded system and LabVIEW
tools allow us to use a single
hardware platform to create
multiple, high-performance
machine testing and monitoring
solutions," said Don Owen,
software engineer at Xerox."The
increased performance of the new
cRIO-9012 and cRIO-9014
controllers allow us to perform
significantly more of the signal
processing of our monitoring
applications directly on distributed
CompactRIO systems.
"The cRIO-9014 controller
delivers the highest processing
power, and the highest amount of
memory and nonvolatile storage,
of the entire family of CompactRIO
controllers. The new controller has
a Freescale 400 MHz MPC5200
processor that contains an
integrated floating-point unit and
hardware-based memory
management unit, providing
engineers with fast data
throughput to handle complex
signal processing algorithms for
control prototyping and machine
monitoring/protection
applications. The Wind River
VxWorks RTOS running on the
MPC5200 processor provides the
controller with dependable
performance to reduce jitter and
increase reliability for high-speed
control applications. The cRIO-9014
controller also contains a faulttolerant
file system,making it ideal
for embedded logging applications
where reliable logging is critical.
The cRIO-9014 complements the
existing family of CompactRIO
controllers (see table) to deliver
......CONTD
