NIWeek: Xilinx honours team for LabView FPGA design

Xilinx has honoured the winner of the LabView FPGA Innovation Award at a ceremony during the NIWeek 2012, National Instruments' technology conference and exhibition in Austin, Texas.

The winning design team was selected by a judging panel of National Instruments and Xilinx represenattives to have the most innovative application using LabVIEW system design software to program the FPGA in NI hardware.

The Data Science Automation design team was recognized for its use of FPGA technology in a mission-critical oil and gas industry field application. 

"I'm proud to honor this year's LabVIEW FPGA award recipients from Data Science Automation for exemplifying the tremendous performance, flexibility and freedom afforded by FPGAs for tackling complex engineering challenges to address practical applications that impact our everyday lives," said Xilinx vice president for processing platforms, Larry Getman.
The company's "Developing a Hydraulic Fracturing Pump Controller" paper describes a new real-time system with built-in operator safety procedures for monitoring and controlling a hydraulic oil well fracturing pump under hazardous environmental conditions in which pressures can exceed 15,000 pounds per square inch at an injection rate of more than 10 barrels per minute.
Using LabVIEW to program the FPGA in CompactRIO, the engineering team built an affordable system that met stringent performance, price and time-to-market requirements. The system not only controls the hydraulic fracturing pump for operator and equipment safety, but carefully monitors surrounding conditions to ensure environmental safety and protection on the job site. 
FPGA technology in the CompactRIO enables high-channel density, high-speed processing and automated control.