National Instruments will be showing its new 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.