EC: NI Single-Board RIO General Purpose Inverter Controller

Power - Energy, power protection: The NI Single-Board RIO General Purpose Inverter Controller is a cost-effective, deployment-ready embedded system with a specific set of analog and digital I/O for FPGA-based power electronics control and monitoring. This is a Control Engineering 2013 Engineers' Choice finalist.

By Control Engineering November 12, 2012

The NI Single-Board RIO General Purpose Inverter Controller (GPIC) provides a standard reconfigurable I/O (RIO) architecture for smart, grid-tied power conversion systems with a comprehensive NI LabVIEW system design toolchain that significantly reduces the time, cost and risk of embedded system design. This product revolutionizes the design, testing and large-scale deployment of new digital energy conversion systems. In fact, using the NI Single-Board RIO GPIC makes it possible for users to save an average of 114 person-months per design and complete their development in half the time with a team that is 60% smaller.

The new prevalidated embedded system provides a standard set of analog and digital I/O and 58 DSP cores embedded in the FPGA fabric to meet the specific control, I/O, performance and cost needs of most smart-grid power electronics applications, including dc-to-ac, ac-to-dc, dc-to-dc, and ac-to-ac converters for flexible ac transmission systems, renewable energy generation, energy storage, and variable speed drive applications.

Additionally, the NI Single-Board RIO GPIC and LabVIEW toolchain enable a revolutionary new embedded system design approach for rapid commercial deployment of advanced, field-reconfigurable digital energy conversion systems. The high-level graphical system design platform and standard reconfigurable I/O (RIO) FPGA-based control system empower companies to in-source their designs without any knowledge of register level languages, such as Verilog and VHDL.

www.ni.com

www.ni.com/singleboard/gpic

National Instruments