Express DAQ provides X factor
01 September 2009
New devices add advanced timing, synchronisation and optimisation for multicore CPUs
National Instruments has released the X Series multifunction data acquisition (DAQ) devices for PCI Express and PXI Express. The 16 new X Series DAQ devices provide enhancements to analogue I/O, digital I/O, onboard counters and multidevice synchronisation. X Series devices integrate native PCI Express support for high-throughput data transfer, advanced timing and synchronisation 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 analogue inputs (AI), four analogue outputs (AO), 48 digital I/O lines and four counters, range from low-cost 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 – the practical maximum of the PCI bus. For this reason, X Series devices use the high-throughput PCI Express bus.
PCI Express offers several 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 analogue, digital and counter data and, with the dedicated nature of the bus, engineers can easily 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 optimised for low-latency I/O, which improves performance in control and single-point applications.
Advanced timing and triggering functionality on multifunction DAQ devices traditionally required onboard counters, complex code or manual signal routing to achieve specialized hardware-timed performance. New NI-STC3 technology provides X Series devices with independent timing engines for the onboard analog and digital I/O subsystems, so engineers can execute analogue and digital I/O independently at different rates or together with synchronisation. 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 analogue and digital sampling rates with five times better resolution than previous devices.
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