National Instruments Expands High-Speed Digitiser Product Line

29th October 2008

NI-Emerson

ES Admin

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National Instruments has announced the expansion of its digitiser product line with the introduction of three new digitisers/PC-based oscilloscopes. The 500 MHz NI PXI-5153 and NI PCI-5153 and the 1 GHz NI PCI-5154 modules round out the NI 515x series of digitisers, following the introduction of the NI PXI-5154 in July. With the NI 515x series, engineers can take advantage of a complete line of high-speed digitisers – with 300 MHz, 500 MHz and 1 GHz bandwidths – for demanding automated test and streaming applications where high-bandwidth measurements are required.

All three new products feature up to 256 MB of deep onboard memory per channel, providing accurate measurements by sustaining up to 2 GS/s real-time sampling rates over extended data capture windows. Engineers can use these digitisers to address a wide range of measurement needs in the consumer electronics, semiconductor, aerospace and defence and life sciences industries.

“High-bandwidth measurements are a complicated and expensive part of any automated test system,” said Ray Morgan, Senior Product Engineer at ON Semiconductor. “With the 1 GHz PXI-5154 digitiser and the 2.7 GHz PXI-2547 8x1 high-frequency multiplexer, we created a low-cost 16-channel oscilloscope. The 1 GHz digitiser in the modular format has helped us test our new high-bandwidth products at a fraction of our previous test times.”

NI 515x digitisers are the first high-bandwidth digitisers on the market with three characteristics that make them optimised for automated test – tight synchronisation between channels, ease of integration with other instrumentation and high data throughput. Using T-Clock technology, which synchronises multiple instruments and was patented by National Instruments, engineers can integrate NI 515x digitisers with a variety of NI hardware, including arbitrary waveform generators and digital waveform generator/analysers, to customise and build a complete, automated mixed-signal test system. Engineers can also synchronise multiple digitisers to build systems with up to 34 channels in a single PXI chassis, all simultaneously sampling at 1 GS/s and synchronised to picosecond-level accuracy between modules.

The PXI platform, upon which NI high-speed digitisers are built, provides measurement throughput up to 10 times faster than alternative instrument architectures because of the high-bandwidth and low-latency PCI bus. The digitisers’ high bandwidth, fast data throughput and tight multi-module synchronisation are particularly beneficial for applications including mass spectrometry, radar, signal intelligence, non-destructive test and high-channel-count physics experimentation.

Engineers can combine the new digitisers with NI LabVIEW SignalExpress interactive measurement software to quickly acquire data, perform measurements and view and analyse data in Microsoft Excel or NI DIAdem test management software. Additionally, the NI 515x digitisers work with all National Instruments software including the NI LabVIEW graphical system design platform and the NI LabWindows™/CVI ANSI C development environment as well as other development environments such as ANSI C, Microsoft C++ and Visual Basic.