Disruptive technology [LabVIEW FPGA

Abstract

Manufacturing techniques have evolved over time - from yesterday's mass production to today's flexible automation and on to tomorrow's reconfigurable automation. Control engineers are increasingly using embedded technologies such as field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) in combination with PCs and programmable logic controllers (PLCs) to solve complex control applications, that improve system response times and provide added reliability and determinism. Using products such as LabVIEW, National Instrument's graphical development environment, we can define the logic in FPGA chips that are embedded across a family of reconfigurable I/O hardware targets without knowledge of low-level hardware description languages (HDLs), such as VHDL or Verilog, or board-level hardware design. Additionally, it allows to easily integrating image acquisition and analysis, motion control, and industrial communications on a floating point processor that works in conjunction with the FPGA.