National Instruments CompactRIO is an advanced embedded control and acquisition system powered by NI reconfigurable I/O (RIO) technology. Control and acquisition system vendors widely use field-programmable gate array (FPGA) devices due to their performance, reconfigurability, small size, and low engineering development costs. Now, LabVIEW programmers do not have to know specialized hardware design languages such as VHDL to take advantage of user-programmable FPGAs to create highly optimized reconfigurable control and acquisition systems. With CompactRIO, you can rapidly build embedded control or acquisition systems that rival the performance and optimization of custom-designed hardware circuitry.

CompactRIO combines a low-power-consumption, real-time embedded processor with a high-performance RIO FPGA chipset. The RIO core has built-in data transfer mechanisms to pass data to the embedded processor for real-time analysis, post processing, data logging, or communication to a networked host computer. CompactRIO provides direct hardware access to the I/O circuitry of each I/O module using LabVIEW FPGA elemental I/O functions. Each I/O module includes built-in connectivity, signal conditioning, conversion circuitry (such as ADC or DAC), and an optional isolation barrier. This represents a low-cost architecture with open access to low-level hardware resources.