National Instruments announced X Series multifunction data acquisition (DAQ) devices for PCI Express and PXI Express. The 16 new X Series DAQ devices provide enhancements to analog I/O, digital I/O, onboard counters, and multidevice synchronization. X Series devices integrate native PCI Express support for high-throughput data transfer, advanced timing, and synchronization technology for precise measurement and control, and the ability to perform advanced processing and analysis on today’s multicore systems.
X Series DAQ devices, which include up to 32 analog inputs (AI), four analog outputs (AO), 48 digital I/O lines, and four counters, range from 250 kS/s multiplexed AI to 2 MS/s simultaneous sampling AI. Simultaneous X Series devices integrate up to 16 ADCs on a single device at 2 MS/s per channel, so engineers can sample all AI channels at a high rate and with minimal phase offset. With high sampling on all channels, simultaneous X Series devices pass large quantities of data back to the host PC, delivering a total AI throughput of up to 64 MB/s. With the added throughput of AO, digital I/O, and counter operations, total throughput can surpass 100 MB/s for a single device. For this reason, X Series devices use the high-throughput PCI Express bus.
PCI Express offers many benefits to data acquisition applications, including dedicated bandwidth to each device of up to 250 MB/s in each direction. With this additional bandwidth, users can acquire larger quantities of analog, digital, and counter data and—with the dedicated nature of the bus—engineers can expand their systems to include multiple data acquisition devices. The new X Series devices integrate a native PCI Express interface, which is designed to provide the full 250 MB/s of PCI Express bandwidth, as opposed to a PCI-to-PCI Express bridge interface, which limits the device bandwidth to that of the PCI bus. These devices also are optimized for low-latency I/O, which improves performance in control and single-point applications.
NI-STC3 technology provides X Series devices with independent timing engines for the onboard analog and digital I/O subsystems, so engineers can execute analog and digital I/O independently at different rates or together with synchronization. X Series devices include four enhanced 32-bit counters for frequency, pulse-width modulation (PWM) and encoder operations and a new 100 MHz timebase that can generate analog and digital sampling rates with five times better resolution than previous devices.
National Instruments, www.ni.com
Published in R & D magazine: Vol. 51, No. 7, December, 2009, p.61.
