LabVIEW FPGA innovation award

The folks at Xilinx honored the winner of the NI LabVIEW FPGA Innovation Award last night at the Graphical System Design Achievement Awards ceremony at the Hilton Hotel during the NIWeek 2012 Worldwide Graphical System Design Conference and Exhibition in Austin, Texas.

The winning design team was selected by a judging panel of National Instruments (NI) and Xilinx participants in recognition for the most innovative application using NI LabVIEW system design software to program the field programmable gate array (FPGA) in NI hardware to boost overall system performance. For this year’s Graphical Design Achievement Awards competition, NI received 120 total submissions from 23 countries in eight award categories for a diverse set of applications.

Xilinx vice president for processing platforms, Larry Getman, presented the LabVIEW FPGA Innovation Award to Dr. Gregory Cala, chief technology officer, and Brad Westfall, senior measurement and automation consultant, of Data Science Automation.  

The Data Science Automation design team was recognized for excellent use of FPGA technology in a mission-critical oil and gas industry field application.  The company’s “Developing a Hydraulic Fracturing Pump Controller” paper describes a new real-time system with built-in operator safety procedures for monitoring and controlling a hydraulic oil well fracturing pump under hazardous environmental conditions in which pressures can exceed 15,000 pounds per square inch at an injection rate of more than 10 barrels per minute.

Using LabVIEW to program the FPGA in CompactRIO, the engineering team built an affordable system that met stringent performance, price and time-to-market requirements. The system not only controls the hydraulic fracturing pump for operator and equipment safety, but carefully monitors surrounding conditions to ensure environmental safety and protection on the job site.  

FPGA technology in the CompactRIO enables high-channel density, high-speed processing and automated control.  Parallel processing in the FPGA makes it possible for many sensors and units to be monitored in a single system, rather than multiple processing engines. And, a smart unit incorporates all legacy system functionality into a single control module with a common interface to enable both automated control and manual operation in a concise touch panel.

About Xilinx and National Instruments
For more than a decade, Xilinx and National Instruments have successfully collaborated on the delivery of more than 60 flagship NI RIO products, which combine LabVIEW system design software and NI reconfigurable input/output (RIO) hardware systems with embedded Xilinx “All Programmable” FPGAs. The productivity of the NI LabVIEW FPGA Module allows any engineer or scientist to quickly leverage flexible, high-performance FPGAs within innovative control, measurement and test systems without the need to learn traditional electronic design automation tools and methodologies.

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