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Boards acquire speedy signals

A Dataquest Solutions product story
Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team Aug 27, 2003

With an aggregate sample rate up to 200Msample/s, the MI30 series of PCI data acquisition boards provides a way to capture the extremely rapid signal events with excellent resolution.

With an aggregate sample rate up to 200Msample/s, the MI30 series of PCI data acquisition boards provides a way to capture the extremely rapid signal events with excellent resolution.

Capture at the highest speeds is performed direct to onboard memory, which on the MI30 is available up to 256 million samples.

At speeds of tens of megasamples per second this onboard memory can be used in another way, as a very large circular buffer (FIFO mode).

This allows PC to continuously transfer the data off the board direct to its memory (RAM), or indeed to the hard drive, while data processing proceeds and signal capture continues.

All this performance is enhanced by several programmable trigger modes acting on input signal amplitude or gradient.

Of particular note is a trigger option which looks at the signal amplitude over a user-defined period of time, ignoring multiple crossings of the trigger level and hence providing a way of rejecting false triggers caused by electrical noise.

A separate connector is also provided on the MI30 for triggering off digital (TTL) signals, a popular method where the board is interfaced to bench instrumentation.

The MI30 is available with one-, two- and four-channel configurations, each with a separate A/D convertor to allow simultaneous capture and avoid the problems associated with timing skew between channels.

To expand channel count multiple boards can be synchronised together.

These can be of the same type, or combined with the Spectrum fast digital I/O and arbitrary waveform generator hardware, thus providing a very comprehensive test and analysis system.

All Spectrum series hardware comes with free drivers for DOS/Windows 3.x, Windows 95/98, Windows NT/2000 and Linux.

Documentation and source code examples are provided for Visual C, C++, Visual Basic, Delphi, LabView, DasyLab, Agilent VEE, LabWindowsCVI and Matlab.

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