AUSTIN, Texas, Aug. 3, 2011 – Xilinx, Inc. (NASDAQ: XLNX) honored winners of the new NI LabVIEW FPGA Innovation Award last night at the Graphical System Design Achievement Awards ceremony at the Austin Convention Center during the NIWeek 2011Worldwide Graphical System Design Conference and Exhibition in Austin, Texas.
Winning design teams were selected by a judging panel of National Instruments (NI) and Xilinx participants in recognition for the most innovative applications using NI LabVIEW system design software to program the field-programmable gate array (FPGA) in NI hardware to boost overall system performance. Notably, this year’s Graphical Design Achievement Awards competition achieved a new record with 130 total submissions across all award categories from 20 countries in a diverse set of applications.
Xilinx Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing and Business Development, Vin Ratford, presented the new LabVIEW FPGA Innovation Award to design teams from the Max Planck Florida Institute for a powerful and versatile custom instrument that manipulates atoms to study fundamental quantum properties of light-matter interaction, and to the Konkuk University in South Korea for a novel autopilot system for a rotary unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to ensure on-course stability of a helicopter in a programmed flight path.
“We’re delighted with the phenomenal response from industry and academia to this year’s first-ever LabVIEW FPGA design achievement award,” said Ratford. “The market-changing products and technologies we considered in this competition each hold the promise of improving the quality of our everyday lives.
“Tonight we celebrate all of the talented engineering teams who submitted inventions that tapped into the power of programmable logic. I’m especially proud to honor this year’s LabVIEW FPGA award recipients from the Max Planck Florida Institute and Konkuk University for exemplifying the tremendous performance, flexibility and freedom afforded by FPGAs for tackling complex engineering challenges.”
The Max Planck Florida Institute design team was recognized for an outstanding solution to a challenging scientific problem in its “FPGA-based Feedback Control of a Single Atom Trajectory” paper. It describes the inventive use of LabVIEW software to program an NI FlexRIO FPGA module used with the NI 6581 high-speed digital I/O adapter module to design a system that manipulates atoms to study fundamental quantum properties of light-matter interaction. Christian Sames accepted the award on behalf of design team membersAlexander Kubanek, Markus Koch, Matthias Apel, Maximilian Balbach, Karim Murr, and Gerhard Rempe of the Max-Planck Institute, Alexei Ourjoumtsev of the Institut d’Optique andPepijn W. H. Pinkse of the MESA+Institute for Nanotechnology.
The Konkuk University design team was honored for a novel instrumentation platform that fully exploits the advantages of the FPGA to process substantial amounts of sensor data in its “Rotary UAV Autopilot – Navigation and Autopilot System Development of RUAV based on Virtual Instrumentation Platform” paper. It describes the exceptional use of LabVIEW software to program an NI Single-Board RIO FPGA module as an autopilot for a small unmanned helicopter using a virtual instrumentation platform. The autopilot system processes information from sensors that included GPS navigation, an inertial measurement unit, a photo sensor capturing main rotor RPM data, and barometric altimeter to accurately follow a programmed flight path, while keeping the helicopter stable and on-course. Konkuk University students Byoung-Jin Lee and Seung-Jun Lee accepted the award at last night’s ceremony.
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 30,000 different companies worldwide, with its largest customer representing approximately 4 percent of revenue in 2010 and no one industry representing more than 15 percent of revenue. Headquartered in Austin, Texas, NI has approximately 5,500 employees and direct operations in more than 40 countries. For the past 12 years, FORTUNE magazine has named NI one of the 100 best companies to work for in America. Readers can obtain investment information from the company’s investor relations department by calling (512) 683-5090, e-mailing nati@ni.com or visiting www.ni.com/nati.
About Xilinx
Xilinx is the world’s leading provider of programmable platforms. For more information, visit: http://www.xilinx.com/.
