USA: National Instruments has joined Power.org, an open and collaborative organization dedicated to developing and promoting Power Architecture technology as the preferred open standard platform for the electronics industry.

Power Architecture technology, an instruction set architecture prevalent in microprocessors, forms an enhanced platform for collaborative hardware and software innovation between leading technology firms such as Freescale Semiconductor, IBM, Xilinx and National Instruments.

The goal of Power.org members is to create community specifications as well as support development tools that work together to facilitate integration and improved implementations.

National Instruments offers over 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 ommunity."

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 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.