Product designers in every industry face some common pressures; application functionality must increase while time-to-market must reduce.
To achieve this, designers and engineers with bright ideas are exploiting ever-advancing technologies to hold their own in a world dominated by a harsh business environment and cautious investors. A rapid design, prototype and deploy process has become essential to the success of a product; the FPGA can often be the 
way to achieve this.
But using FPGAs brings its own challenges: the time needed to program an FPGA in a traditional hardware description language (HDL) is not trivial, and the learning curve required before one can even begin is steep.
Add to this the need for PCB design and the question is posed: for applications where short time-to-market is critical, are the benefits of FPGAs out of reach? With the use of advanced high-level software 
and commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware, thankfully, the answer is no.
The ability to use FPGAs to rapidly prototype and deploy a system was demonstrated by engineers working at KC BioMediX.
A start-up medical device company, they had a lifesaving product proposal that required a custom embedded solution, but limited funds. Up to one third of the 600,000 premature infants born in the United States each year have feeding problems because they can struggle to coordinate sucking, swallowing and breathing.
Infants born prematurely often spend weeks, and sometimes months, with tubes and masks covering their faces. This hinders them from learning how to eat at a critically important stage of brain development.
To help premature babies learn to feed orally, engineers at KC BioMediX developed the NTrainer system, a computerised pacifier with a tip that pulses with gentle bursts of air. Doctors or nurses can use the device to get a far more accurate assessment of a baby’s feeding ability, and then begin therapy to train the infantile brain and help the baby to learn to suck.
The costs of using a 3rd party company to commercialise the treatment were too high, so the development was brought in-house and made use of high level graphical programming tools, in conjunction with COTS hardware, an approach known as graphical system design.
The software tool they chose was LabVIEW, with National Instruments also providing the hardware via its RIO platforms. A data-flow language with similar logic to a flow chart, it is designed to enable a user without a background in software and/or HDL development to develop and deploy complex systems.
With the LabVIEW FPGA Module, this graphical code can be compiled directly into a bit-file and onto an FPGA without the need for any lengthy HDL development.
This democratisation of FPGA development allowed the lead engineer at KC BioMediX to create a proof of concept in only three weeks, securing the continued funding and development of the venture.
However, rapid FPGA design is only half the story, with such a short timescale, in-house hardware design was out of the question. By using modular COTS hardware, development time was dramatically reduced.
The CompactRIO hardware platform combines an embedded real-time processor, an FPGA and hot-swappable I/O modules. Each I/O module is connected directly to the FPGA, providing low-level customisation of timing and I/O signal processing.
The FPGA is connected to the embedded real-time processor via a high-speed PCI bus. This represents a low-cost architecture with open access to low-level hardware resources.
This hardware architecture contains built-in data transfer mechanisms to pass data from the I/O modules to the FPGA and also from the FPGA to the embedded processor for real-time analysis, post processing, data logging or communication to a networked host computer. By architecting the system with this closely integrated hardware and software platform, KC BioMediX reduced their development cost by $250,000 whilst cutting their development time from four months to just four weeks.
The final challenge for any successful design team is to deploy their prototype into a more cost effective, high volume format whilst maintaining as much of the development investment as possible. COTS hardware can be the solution, as the vendor absorbs all circuit design costs. The KC BioMediX team moved their design to NI Single-Board RIO, a COTS board-level format without needing to change any of their already developed LabVIEW code.
The NTrainer is proof of how, with use of the latest high-level development and deployment technologies, high-tech start-ups can flourish even in an age of financial strife.
With a move away from restrictive custom embedded solutions, and towards accessible FPGA design software with flexible COTS hardware, the dual challenge of increasing application complexity whilst reducing time-to market can be addressed. If you adopt a graphical system design approach, you no longer need to be an expert in low-level HDL, embedded software and PCB creation to design, prototype and deploy your next great product idea.
Ian Bell is market and business development manager at National Instruments UK and Ireland