Interview with John Hottenroth

Featured Engineer

John Hottenroth

John Hottenroth - Market Development Manager - High Performance FPGA Applications; National Instruments

Image: “Enjoying a Guinness and a rooftop view of Edinburgh castle with some work colleagues after customer meetings in Scotland (I’m on the right)”

What are your favorite hardware tools that you use?

I work with a lot of customers using a hardware platform called NI FlexRIO. The hardware combines interchangeable, customizable I/O adapter modules with a user-programmable FPGA module. Essentially, the hardware provides off-the-shelf FPGA modules that a larger system can be built around. The modules include infrastructure components for I/O connectivity, bus interfacing and DRAM communication, which are components that can consume a lot of development time in a project, distracting developers from new innovations where they add the most value (and the areas they usually enjoy most).

Can you tell us a bit more about the NI FlexRIO?

Specifically, the FPGA modules are built on Virtex 5 LX and SX FPGAs, in a PXI or PXI Express form factor (which uses the cPCI form factor and adds specialized synchronization buses and other software features). The boards include onboard DRAM up to 512 MB and PCI Express bus interfacing at rates up to 800 MB/s. The front of the modules has direct access to the FPGA I/O with data bandwidth of up to 8.25 GB/s to the adapter module. A variety of analog and digital adapter modules provide interfaces from single-ended and differential high-speed digital interfaces for implementing custom protocols, to 16-bit analog inputs at 250 MS/s for IF acquisition, to 32-channel analog input boards for phased array ultrasound and other high channel count applications, to Camera Link interfaces for vision analysis. In addition, there is a module development kit which allows a user to create their own custom I/O and signal conditioning.

Here is a link to the website to find more information. All the single-quantity prices are available on the web if someone wanted to look at a specific configuration, but it ranges from a few thousand dollars up to around $14k for the highest performance FPGA and adapter module.

What are your favorite software tools that you use?

Definitely LabVIEW FPGA. LabVIEW FPGA is a graphical design language for FPGA programming, which uses the same graphical programming methodology as LabVIEW for Windows. Since FPGAs are inherently parallel, I think it provides a very intuitive way for FPGA programming. So essentially, I can use built-in LabVIEW FPGA IP for infrastructure components like PCI Express bus interfacing and I/O integration, leverage 3rd party VHDL (including Xilinx CoreGen IP) when appropriate, and also developing graphical code in LabVIEW FPGA what that’s most efficient. It’s a very effective system design tool, which can help reduce the time and cost of traditional FPGA programming.

LabVIEW FPGA is similar to other standard FPGA IDE tools in that it allows an engineer to develop FPGA code, but the development is in a graphical environment (LabVIEW). When compiled, LabVIEW FPGA compiles to intermediate VHDL code and then passes this code to the Xilinx ISE compiler tools to optimize, reduce, and synthesize it into the FPGA bitstream. It can integrate with standard debugging tools like Xilinx ChipScope or Mentor Graphics ModelSim for cycle-accurate simulation. One benefit of development in LabVIEW FPGA is integration of components like DMA engines and a host of different IP that’s built into the environment. Another big benefit of LabVIEW FPGA comes after simulation, when the design actually needs to be tested. When the LabVIEW FPGA code is compiled for the FlexRIO FPGA module, it can very easily be integrated with actual I/O, and then even integrated into a larger system with all the other subcomponents. For more information, click here.

What has been your favorite project?

I work with a lot of customers using NI FlexRIO to design next generation medical imaging systems (including ultrasound, optical coherence tomography, MRI, and others), and I see a lot of amazing innovations being driven in that industry. However, one of the most compelling was a recent project with a professor at Kitasato University in Japan, who created the world’s first real-time 3D optical coherence tomography (OCT) imaging system. Their team created an acquisition system combining 320 simultaneous channels, 22 FPGAs, peer-to-peer streaming between FPGAs over direct DMA, and GPU rendering to achieve the real-time processing requirements. If you are interested in the full details of the solution, feel free to check out the case study – Developing the World’s First Real-Time 3D OCT Medical Imaging System with LabVIEW and NI FlexRIO.

Do you have any note-worthy engineering experiences?

When I first started at NI, I was an applications engineer. One of the customers I was working with was doing research for Parkinson’s Disease. He was using several of our data acquisition cards to acquire 96 channels that were connected to electrodes monitoring the brain of a lab rat, and then he was analyzing the brain waves in LabVIEW as the rat went about his daily routine. The end goal of the research was to help people who had no mobility to be able to control things by thinking them. That was pretty cool.

What are you currently working on?

Right now I’m working with a partner on a customizable platform for phased array ultrasound imaging, which can scale to an arbitrary number of transmit and receive channels. Most people have to develop fully custom systems for this, but this obviously takes a long time. Using FlexRIO, the partner was able to go from the initial architecture specification to a working prototype showing real-time 3D imaging in about 3 months, so there are a lot of other groups (especially on the research side) who are anxious to get ahold of their hardware and software that will enable easier development over a fully custom design.

What direction do you see your business heading in the next few years?

Right now, NI is investing a lot in RF and FPGA technology, leveraging the PXI platform. I see the business continuing to develop new hardware that leverages higher performance FPGAs and software that makes integration of the system easier for engineers. A couple examples of this include a new PXI digitizer that we just joint-developed with Tektronix and a new PXI VSA that has best-in-class RF measurement accuracy and speed at a significantly lower cost compared to the current gold standard box instruments.

What challenges do you foresee in our industry?

One big challenge I see is fewer kids going into engineering and science related fields. I think we need to help kids get excited about engineering careers. I think there are a lot of ways to help do this, but one that I really like is FIRST Robotics, which has teams of high school students actually designing robots and competing in various challenges. It has seen a lot of success and growth over the past few years and I hope this and other programs can help ignite a spark of excitement to help kids realize that engineering can be fun too!

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