12bit digitiser boards offer "more for less"

A new family of 12bit PCI waveform digitisers meets the needs of OEM applications involving ultrasonic imaging and inspection, shock and vibration, manufacturing test and scientific R and D.

A new family of 12bit PCI waveform digitisers meets the needs of OEM customers and applications involving ultrasonic imaging and inspection, shock and vibration, manufacturing test and scientific research and development.

The new 12bit family is led by the ATS1250, a two-channel, 12bit, 50Msample/s PCI digitiser starting at $1795.

The other member of the family is the ATS1220, a two-channel, 12bit, 20Msample/s PCI digitiser starting at $1295.

"Our OEM customers were asking for more dynamic range to tackle ultrasonic, radar, imaging and shock and vibration signals.

At the same time, they did not want to pay premium prices.

We were able to quickly respond to their needs by designing the 12bit PCI digitiser family to suit all the target applications at a price that customers love", stated Muneeb Khalid, President of AlazarTech.

Designers of the 12bit PCI digitiser family took advantage of latest developments in ADC technology and the company's ASoPC (acquisition system on programmable chip) technology to not only provide a 40% price advantage over equivalent products on the market, but also provide 60dB signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and pack in more standard features, thus fitting in with the company's "more for less" strategy.

ATS1250 and ATS1220 PCI digitisers provide independently programmable input ranges from +/-20mV to +/-20V, AC/DC coupling and 50ohm/1Mohm impedance on each of its two channels.

The sampling rate is also programmable from 50Msample/s down to 10Ksample/s.

Users can capture signals from rapidly occurring triggers by using multiple record mode that allows both pre- and post-trigger capability.

A 40bit time stamp allows users to record the occurrence of each trigger event relative to all other triggers in a given session.

The standard model comes with 128K points of acquisition memory per channel.

A high memory model with 8M points per channel will be available in July of 2004.

Acquired data can be transferred to the host PC memory using scatter-gather DMA (bus mastering) that provides transfer rates in excess of 40Mbyte/s even under the Windows operating system.

The ATS1250 and ATS1220 digitisers are accompanied by ATScope software that allows the user to set up the digitiser, acquire signals and view and store them without writing a single line of programming code or drawing any diagrams.

OEMs can integrate the ATS1250 and ATS1220 PCI digitisers into their own systems very easily using the Windows XP/2000/98SE 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.

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