National Instruments today
announced it has joined Power.org, an open and collaborative
organization dedicated to developing and promoting Power Architecture
technology as the preferred open standard platform for the electronics
industry. Power Architecture technology, an instruction set
architecture prevalent in microprocessors, forms an enhanced platform
for collaborative hardware and software innovation between leading
technology companies such as Freescale Semiconductor, IBM, Xilinx and
National Instruments. The goal of Power.org members is to create
community specifications as well as support development tools that work
together to facilitate integration and improved implementations.
“Power.org is pleased to have National Instruments join our open
community and to have them contribute to the ecosystem through work on
collaborative technology and standards,” said Roland Hagan, chairman of
the Power.org Board of Directors and vice president of marketing and
strategy for IBM Global Engineering Solutions. “Since the start of
2007, the organization has not only grown but leveraged the expertise
and commitment of companies like National Instruments to deliver new
standards and programs while increasing business value to the design
engineering community.”
National Instruments offers more than 30 years of technology leadership
to Power.org as well as significant experience supporting Power
Architecture technology through the company’s graphical system design
platform. As a member of Power.org, National Instruments benefits from
the collaboration with leading technology companies whose expertise of
Power Architecture technology can be applied to the creation of
high-performance, rugged and low-power commercial off-the-shelf (COTS)
NI hardware. National Instruments also extends the benefits of
Power.org to engineers and scientists by making it possible for them to
combine COTS hardware with NI LabVIEW
graphical development tools to program Power Architecture processors
and quickly design, prototype and deploy embedded systems.
“National Instruments has a history of providing technologies that
demonstrate a commanding knowledge of the Power Architecture technology
and an understanding of the importance of tightly integrated commercial
off-the-shelf hardware and easy-to-use software,” said Fawzi Behmann,
chairman of the Power.org Marketing Committee and director of strategic
marketing at Freescale. “The experience and leadership National
Instruments offers will help Power.org develop both software and
hardware specifications and guidelines that will result in a more
cohesive Power Architecture community.”
Several National Instruments products support Power Architecture technology including the CompactRIO
reconfigurable embedded control and acquisition system. CompactRIO
integrates a Freescale Power Architecture-based real-time processor, an
embedded Xilinx field-programmable gate array (FPGA) chip and a
wide variety of I/O modules to give engineers a COTS hardware platform
for building embedded systems. Using graphical system design, engineers
and scientists can take advantage of the ease of use of LabVIEW to
quickly program the real-time processor, FPGA and I/O of the small,
rugged CompactRIO embedded system for a wide variety of applications
such as industrial machine control and monitoring, in-vehicle data
logging and embedded prototyping.
“The broad adoption of the Power Architecture makes it ideal for
prototyping and deploying embedded systems using graphical system
design,” said Dr. James Truchard, National Instruments president, CEO
and cofounder. “We look forward to collaborating with the Power.org
community to help advance the microprocessor architecture and to help
realize its full potential.”
As a member of Power.org, National Instruments will contribute to the
organization through active participation in the Power.org business
committees and technical working groups.
About National Instruments
National Instruments (www.ni.com)
is transforming the way engineers and scientists design, prototype and
deploy systems for measurement, automation and embedded applications.
NI empowers customers with off-the-shelf software such as NI LabVIEW
and modular cost-effective hardware, and sells to a broad base of more
than 25,000 different companies worldwide, with no one customer
representing more than 3 percent of revenue and no one industry
representing more than 10 percent of revenue. Headquartered in Austin,
Texas, NI has more than 4,500 employees and direct operations in nearly
40 countries. For the past eight years, FORTUNE magazine has named NI
one of the 100 best companies to work for in America.
About Power.org
Power Architecture technology is behind millions of innovative
products, including the world’s fastest supercomputers, leading video
game consoles and electronic systems in most of today’s car models.
Every phone call, email and Web page touches hundreds of Power
Architecture systems.
The Power.org community, formed in 2005, is the collaborative, open
organization driving innovation around Power Architecture™ technology
through alignment of the instruction set architecture, development of
standards and specifications and nurturing of the Power Architecture
brand. Power.org’s mission is to optimize interoperability, accelerate
innovation and drive increased adoption of this leading processor
architecture. For more details, visit www.power.org.
.: Design World :.
Filed Under: Electronics • electrical, Industrial computers, I/O modules
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