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ATS9462 PCI
Express Waveform Digitizer Now Features
On-board Acquisition Memory For Even Faster
Data Streaming
Montreal, Canada (June 22, 2009)
AlazarTech, a manufacturer of high
performance, low cost PC Based Instruments,
today announced the release of ATS9462-64M®
and ATS9462-512M®, two new models
in the ATS9462 family of PCI Express
Waveform Digitizers that have on-board
acquisition memory of 64 MegaSamples per
channel and 512 MegaSamples per channel,
respectively.
The first generation of ATS9462® waveform
digitizers released in 2007 used an 8
kilobyte on-FPGA FIFO to stream data from
the card to host PC memory. On some
computers, this limited the sustained data
throughput achievable, as some motherboard
resources interrupted the DMA for a long
enough period to cause the FIFO to overflow.
The on-board acquisition memory on
ATS9462-64M® and ATS9462-512M® is used as a
very deep FIFO (as much as 512 MegaSamples)
to allow full 720 MB/s data streaming. The
very deep FIFO allows data acquisition to
continue even if DMA is interrupted for
substantial periods.
“We noticed that many of our ATS9462
customers were spending a lot of time
worrying about which motherboard to use”,
stated Muneeb Khalid, President of
AlazarTech. “Adding on-board acquisition
memory has eased this worry, as customers
can now use virtually any modern computer”.
Memory upgrade kits are available for
existing customers of ATS9462. Upgrades can
be performed at customer site without having
to send the units back to the factory.
ATS9462®
offers two simultaneous analog inputs that
can each be sampled at rates up to 180 MS/s
(one 16 bit 180 MSPS ADC per channel),
providing Signal to Noise Ratio in excess of
72 dB. Each channel can have up to 512
MegaSamples of on-board acquisition memory
buffer that can be used as a very deep FIFO
for data streaming applications. The unit occupies only one
half-length PCI Express x4, x8 or x16 slot.
Almost all waveform digitizers supplied by
competitors feature Single-Port Memory.
Single Port Memory users are forced to stop
the acquisition in order to read captured
data out of on-board, single-port memory,
resulting in potentially valuable data being
missed.
ATS9462®,
with its dual-port memory, can be used in
applications that require:
· Acquisition
of data with a rapidly occurring trigger
(OCT, radar, ultrasonics, spectrometry,
tomography …)
· Acquisition
of data with a randomly occurring trigger
(perimeter security, lightning test, acoustic emissions, …)
· Acquisition
of data in imaging applications that must
not have any breaks
· RF
signal recording applications that require
continuous streaming of data across the bus
OEMs can integrate the ATS9462®
PCI Express digitizers into their own
systems very easily using the Windows
Vista/XP compatible ATS-SDK Software
Development Kit. This SDK includes sample
programs written in C/C++ and Visual BASIC.
A high performance LabVIEW® VI,
called ATS-VI, is also available. A source
code Linux driver, ATS-Linux, can also be
made available to qualified customers, who
will have to execute a Non-Disclosure
Agreement. |
