July 15, 2014. NI has announced the NI SOM. It combines the Xilinx Zynq All Programmable system on chip (SoC) with supporting components such as memory on a small PCB and features a complete middleware solution and ready-to-go Linux-based real-time operating system (RTOS) already integrated. The NI SOM gives design teams the customizability of a SOM without the increased time and risk of developing custom software.
“We have evaluated several SOMs and embedded SBCs, and there is no comparison to the software integration offered by NI,” said Sebastien Boria, R&D mechatronics technology leader at Airbus. “We estimate that our development costs with the NI SOM are a tenth of the costs of alternative approaches because of the productivity gains of NI’s approach to system design, in particular to NI Linux Real-Time and LabVIEW FPGA.”
The NI SOM enables design teams to deploy reliable, complex embedded systems faster because it is based on and has the same rigorous design standards as the LabVIEW reconfigurable I/O (RIO) architecture. This architecture has already been used in high-reliability applications such as unmanned aerial vehicles and cataract surgery machines.
“Today’s embedded monitoring and control applications are more complex than ever before, and tighter deadlines and rising costs only increase stress for system designers,” said Jamie Smith, director of embedded systems marketing at NI. “Studies show that design teams using the LabVIEW RIO architecture can solve complex embedded problems in half the time compared with traditional custom design approaches.”
As for key benefits, NI SOM is shipped with a complete middleware solution out of the box to remove the time and risk associated with developing an embedded OS, custom software drivers and other common software components. LabVIEW FPGA integration eliminates a design team’s need for hardware description language expertise. The NI SOM offers a robust Linux-based RTOS, which gives design teams access to an extensive community of applications and IP. And design teams can use CompactRIO to quickly prototype their applications and then deploy them with the same code used for prototyping, which saves significant time and effort.