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Windows Vista drivers for Oscilloscope, AWG and fast Digital I/O cards

16th April 2007

Strategic Test

ES Admin

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Strategic Test Corporation has announced Windows Vista 64-bit and 32-bit drivers for their range of Digitizer, AWG, fast Digital I/O and Digital Pattern Generator cards. The drivers are compatible with all of the 150 PCI, PXI and CompactPCI cards in the UltraFast series. The Windows Vista drivers are supplied at no cost and can be downloaded by existing customers from the company website. The same simple programming concept found in the other Windows and Linux drivers has been employed, allowing customers to upgrade their OS without modifying their application code.

There are two distinct advantages to 64-bit Windows over 32-bit. 64-bit Windows delivers higher computation performance, significantly benefiting users who perform real-time analysis of measurement data or signal processing. 64-bit Windows also supports up to 128 GBytes of PC RAM as compared to 4 GBytes of 32-bit Windows XP. This allows the use of low-cost PC-memory instead of expensive on-board memory for applications requiring streaming of data to or from the PC. This method also enables longer record or replay times, as the maximum amount of signal memory that can be added to the current range of Digitizer or AWG cards from most vendors is 4 GBytes.

For example, an application requiring a 200 MByte/second acquisition rate using 32-bit Windows, the maximum measurement time would be 17.5 seconds. On a PC configured with 128 GBytes RAM running 64-bit Windows the measurement time would increase to over 6.5 minutes.