ALE Consultants has consulted and trained many teams on using Emerson/NI’s FPGA tools including LabVIEW FPGA.  When development needs to be outsourced ALE Consultants is able to support development from requirements to delivery.

ALE Consultants has worked with nearly all of Emerson/NI’s FPGA hardware product lines.

This includes first and second generation FlexRIO which includes models 795x, 796x, 797x, various FlexRIO Adapter Modules (FAMs) such as the 5734, 6584, and 5751.  ALE Consultants has worked with the third generation FlexRIO including 5785, 5764, 5774, and 7915.

We have worked with Emerson/NI R-Series cards such 7820 and 7857.

We have worked with the Reconfigurable Oscilloscopes which are models 5170, 5171, and 5172.

We have worked with the LabVIEW FPGA workflow of the NI Ettus x410 Software Defined Radio to make changes to the logic.

We have worked with the first and second generation Vector Signal Transceiver (VST) using LabVIEW FPGA.  The first generation models are 5644, 5645, and 5646.  The second generation model we have worked with is the 5820 as part of the 5831.

We have worked with some of the high speed serial products including the 6591, 6592, and 7902.

The 7903 is a co-processor and high speed serial card which was released in 2023.  We have supported customers using this product.

We have worked with LabVIEW FPGA Vivado Export and LabVIEW FPGA IP Export workflows.

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FPGAs enable custom hardware which can be deterministic, low latency, and high throughput.

LabVIEW FPGA has its own functional digital signal processing (DSP) IP blocks but can also work with AMD/Xilinx IP blocks.  For firmware teams with Programmable Logic (PL) expertise, integration of HDL is something we have experience with.

Challenges include selecting the appropriate workflow and determining which IP development and integration approach best fits your group.

Since FPGAs are closer to the I/O of the PC, they can intelligently respond to events in microseconds. The software alone cannot respond in microseconds because of all the layers in a computer.

As with software, when developing for an FPGA, best practices such as Systems Engineering, Model Based Systems Engineering (MBSE), and Software Engineering are critical in addition to expert tool knowledge.

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Terry Stratoudakis, one of the co-founders of ALE Consultants, is the author of the book Introduction to LabVIEW FPGA for RF, Radar, and Electronic Warfare Applications.