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.
ARTIQ uses FPGA hardware to perform its time-critical tasks. The `Sinara hardware <https://github.com/sinara-hw>`_, and in particular the Kasli FPGA carrier, is designed to work with ARTIQ.
ARTIQ is designed to be portable to hardware platforms from different vendors and FPGA manufacturers.
Several different configurations of a `high-end FPGA evaluation kit <http://www.xilinx.com/products/boards-and-kits/ek-k7-kc705-g.html>`_ are also used and supported. FPGA platforms can be combined with any number of additional peripherals, either already accessible from ARTIQ or made accessible with little effort.
