National Instruments Joins Freescale, IBM and Xilinx in Power.org Collaboration

“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 organisation 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 realise its full potential.”

As a member of Power.org, National Instruments will contribute to the organisation through active participation in the Power.org business committees and technical working groups.