National Instruments has announced four new R Series multifunction FPGA-based RIO boards for PCI Express.

The boards offer a Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGA, eight analogue inputs, eight analogue outputs and 96 digital I/O lines.

Using the LabVIEW FPGA Module it is possible to program the onboard FPGA to create custom measurement hardware for custom data acquisition, high-speed control, digital communications protocols, sensor simulation, hardware-in-the-loop and signal processing applications.

It is possible to achieve 16-bit analogue input sampling rates up to 200 kS/s per channel with the NI PCIe-7841R and NI PCIe-7842R and sampling rates up to 750 kS/s per channel with the NI PCIe-7851R and NI PCIe-7852R.

Because they are based on the PCI Express bus, the new R Series boards take advantage of dedicated bandwidth per device for reliable, high-speed data streaming. The boards also offer DMA channels for streaming data to and from the FPGA at more than 100 MB/s per device without significantly impacting processor resources.