It is maintained and developed by `M-Labs <https://m-labs.hk>`_ and the initial development was for and in partnership with the `Ion Storage Group at NIST <https://www.nist.gov/pml/time-and-frequency-division/ion-storage>`_. ARTIQ is free software and offered to the entire research community as a solution equally applicable to other challenging control tasks, including outside the field of ion trapping. Several other laboratories (e.g. at the University of Oxford, the Army Research Lab, and the University of Maryland) have later adopted ARTIQ as their control system and have contributed to it.
The system features a high-level programming language that helps describing complex experiments, which is compiled and executed on dedicated hardware with nanosecond timing resolution and sub-microsecond latency. It includes graphical user interfaces to parametrize and schedule experiments and to visualize and explore the results.
Currently, several different configurations of a `high-end FPGA evaluation kit <http://www.xilinx.com/products/boards-and-kits/ek-k7-kc705-g.html>`_ are used and supported. This FPGA platform can be combined with any number of additional peripherals, either already accessible from ARTIQ or made accessible with little effort.
Custom hardware components with widely extended capabilities and advanced support for scalable and fully distributed real-time control of experiments `are being designed <https://github.com/m-labs/sinara>`_.
