San Jose, USA - Xilinx, Inc. and National Instruments announced that LocalGrid Technologies, together with Toronto Hydro-Electric System Limited (Toronto Hydro), won the All Programmable Innovation Award presented by Xilinx at the Graphical System Design Achievement Awards ceremony held during NIWeek 2013, in Austin, Texas.
This award is given by NI and Xilinx to honor the most impactful and innovative performance oriented application that uses NI LabVIEW system design software coupled with Xilinx’s ARM® based All Programmable SoCs in NI’s cRIO-9068 hardware. LocalGrid won for its distributed monitoring and control platform that will be used to help modernize today’s power grids.
“Our engineering team used NI LabVIEW software to program the NI cRIO-9068 and build an intelligent system that gives electricity distribution utilities a cost effective platform to collect high-resolution data from their network in real-time and allows them to quickly adapt existing infrastructure to integrate distributed power generation,” said Bob Leigh, CEO at LocalGrid Technologies. “The tight integration between NI and Xilinx technology in the cRIO platform enabled us to reduce our time-to-market by 50%.”
“We congratulate LocalGrid Technologies for their outstanding work and commitment to engineering innovation. Their creative use of the flexibility and performance inherent in Xilinx’s All Programmable SoCs has enabled them to create a game-changing energy control and monitoring system,” said Larry Getman, Vice President of Processing Platforms Marketing at Xilinx.
“Improving power grid quality and creating renewable energy is extremely important, making the LocalGrid Technologies’ submission a timely standout,” said Dave Wilson, Director of Academic Programs, National Instruments. “We are grateful to all of the entrants in our annual Graphical System Design Achievement Awards for continuously pushing the envelope tied to the development of systems that solve real-world issues.”