National Instruments is riding the crest of the FPGA (field programmable gate array) wave with the launch of CompactRIO, an extremely rugged and compact control and data acquisition platform powered by re-configurable I/O (RIO) technology. FPGA chips have gained wide market acceptance among digital design engineers, but programming them is a fairly specialised task. RIO, however, provides a graphical programming environment, thanks to an embedded version of LabVIEW, bringing the benefits of FPGAs to a much wider group of systems developers. The CompactRIO embedded system has a four- or eight-slot re-configurable chassis containing the user-programmable FPGA and ten hot-swappable industrial I/O modules. The four-slot system measures approximately 179x88x88mm, weighs just 1.58kg and consumes a mere 7-10W of power. The unit will operate over a temperature range of -40 to +70°C, and withstand shock loads of up to 50g. In an 'unofficial' drop test, a working CompactRIO continued to function uninterruptedly following a 200g shock - an impact recorded by the instrument itself!