New electronic design specialty

National Instruments has announced the Electronic Design Specialty for NI Alliance Partner Network members with specialised skills in custom electronics. The Electronic Design Specialty identifies trusted experts for customers looking to extend and customise NI reconfigurable I/O (RIO) hardware products, including NI CompactRIO, NI Single-Board RIO and NI FlexRIO, to meet their application needs. For specific customer applications that require specialised I/O or a unique form factor, these partners build RIO Mezzanine Cards (RMC) for NI Single-Board RIO C Series modules using the CompactRIO Module Development Kit (MDK) and NI FlexRIO adapter modules.

“NI RIO hardware and NI LabVIEW system design software give us an off-the-shelf platform for designing advanced embedded control and monitoring systems,” said Terry Coleman Sr., president of Tecnova. “With the openness of the NI embedded platform, as part of the Electronic Design Specialty, we can further customise NI RIO hardware when customers or applications require niche features that the NI platform cannot solve, such as specialised I/O or unique form factors.”

Alliance Partners with the Electronic Design Specialty provide comprehensive embedded design services to NI customers working on advanced control and monitoring applications. Requirements for the specialty include business stability, software design capabilities, LabVIEW developer certification, expertise in NI RIO technology and electronics design and manufacturing capabilities. The following Alliance Partners are inaugural members of the Electronic Design Specialty:

• · S.E.A. Datentechnik GmbH, Troisdorf, (D)
• · Tecnova, Chicago, (IL USA)
• · Cyth Systems, San Diego, (CA USA)
• · WireFlow, Göteborg, (S)
• · Boston Engineering, Boston (MASS USA)
• · Step Automation and Test, Six-Fours-les-Plages, (F)

An integral part of the NI graphical system design approach, NI RIO hardware combined with LabVIEW system design software provides a commercial off-the-shelf solution to simplify development and shorten time to market when designing advanced control, monitoring and test systems. NI RIO hardware, which includes CompactRIO, NI Single-Board RIO, R Series boards and PXI-based NI FlexRIO, features an architecture with powerful floating-point processors, reconfigurable field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and modular I/O. All NI RIO hardware components are programmed with LabVIEW to give engineers the ability to rapidly create custom timing, signal processing and control for I/O without requiring expertise in low-level hardware description languages or board-level design.