What did you think of the LabVIEW FPGA Demo?

[Chad_H]

I was wondering what you all thought of the LabVIEW FPGA Demo at NI Week. If you didn't see it, you can watch it at http://ni.com/niweek/keynote_videos.htm, it is the last presentation listed for Wednesday.

Regards,

Chad H.
Product Support Engineer
National Instruments
http://ni.com/ask

[SachaE]

Very impressive - the capabilities of the FPGA board in the PXI chassis aren't explained though - I understand it's LV code running in hardware, but is it runable in the same way as RT is - i.e. downloaded permanently to the FPGA, and then on starting the chassis, the FPGA is automatically running or do you have it as a .vi which you run, and it interfaces to the FPGA every time it's started?

Thanks

S.

[Joey Oravec]

It was a major turnoff to see the 1.3 to 1.6 MHz number tossed around during
the presentation. I'm sure it's pretty reasonable for the calculation plus
any necessary I/O, however in the FPGA arena I'm more used to looking at the
cycle-time I could achieve than comparing to the loop rate an a VI.

I'm sure that the speed is pretty reasonable, especially if it's a very easy
speedup using this hardware. I just was unconvinced that this would be a
worthwhile speedup given the example. Hopefully there will be some more
metrics available soon.

-joey

"Chad H" wrote in message
news:5065000000080000003C5B0000-1031838699000@exchange.ni.com...
> I was wondering what you all thought of the LabVIEW FPGA Demo at NI
> Week. If you didn't see it, you can watch it
at
> http://ni.com/niweek/keynote_videos.htm, it is the last presentation
> listed for Wednesday.
>
> Regards,
>
> Chad H.
> Product Support Engineer
> National Instruments
> http://ni.com/ask

[Chad_H]

S,

I can't say anything beyond what is in the presentation. Sorry. In a few months we will be conducting a Pioneer Program. People interested in being part of the Pioneer Program can contact their NI Sales Representative for more information.

Regards,

Chad H.
Product Support Engineer
National Instruments
http://ni.com/ask

[John_Howard]

First impression was "COOL!", but since then my enthusiasim has 'cooled' slightly.

I can see the benifits of making FPGA programming easy, but if this is the only real benifit, then most people who actually want to program an FPGA are only going to be slighlty impressed. Where the real benifit would come is if we could QUICKLY modify FPGA code by changing the LabVIEW program, and have the FPGA 'instantly' re-configure. From what I understand, this is actually a time consuming process, right now - and thus not that useful.

There are a few more keys to making this whole idea useful.

1. Support for a wide selection of FPGA's.
2. NO significant performance hit by programming with LabVIEW vs. VHDL.
3. Somehow making a $2000+ LabVIEW license worth th
at price compared to a free internet download.
4. Make it easy to incorporate into existing standard procedures for configuration control. This means getting on-board with the strict SCM departments of many companies.

You guys may have already accounted for all these things, but thought I'd throw these thoughts out there just in case. I'd really like to see LabVIEW FPGA programming become popular and successful.

[Rick B.]

On Thu, 12 Sep 2002 09:06:55 -0500 (CDT), Chad H wrote:

>I was wondering what you all thought of the LabVIEW FPGA Demo at NI
>Week. If you didn't see it, you can watch it at
>http://ni.com/niweek/keynote_videos.htm, it is the last presentation
>listed for Wednesday.
>
>Regards,
>
>Chad H.
>Product Support Engineer
>National Instruments
>http://ni.com/ask

I'm no doubt in the minority here, but anyway to get a text of the
presentation ?

---
Rick Barry
Manufacturing & Test Engineering
Warner Power LLc