GPIB controller goes faster over USB

The GPIB-USB-HS is billed as the industry's fastest USB-to-GPIB controller.

Engineers and scientists can now use the latest USB standard, USB 2.0 high-speed, to control GPIB instruments at transfer rates of up to 8Mbyte/s (64Mbit/s).

The new National Instruments GPIB-USB-HS, the industry's fastest USB-to-GPIB controller, is the latest in the broad offering of NI instrument control products for PCI Express, Ethernet, PCI, USB, PCMCIA and other interfaces.

The NI GPIB-USB-HS controller incorporates an NI TNT GPIB ASIC and a USB 2.0 high-speed chip to achieve GPIB transfer rates comparable to those of the high-performance NI PCI-GPIB plug-in board.

With GPIB transfer rates of up to 1.8Mbyte/s (14.4Mbit/s) in standard IEEE488.1 and 8Mbyte/s (64Mbit/s) in high-speed IEEE488.1 (HS488), the NI GPIB-USB-HS provides a 2x performance improvement over existing USB-to-GPIB controllers.

"Engineers have relied on the widely used GPIB for more than 25 years", said Dany Cheij, NI Instrument Control Product Manager.

"With the increasing popularity and ubiquity of the USB, engineers now can take advantage of the latest USB 2.0 high-speed bus technology to communicate with the millions of GPIB instruments worldwide without sacrificing performance".

With the GPIB-USB-HS, engineers can run existing GPIB applications without modifying their code because the controller uses the popular NI-488.2 and Virtual Instrument Software Architecture (VISA) APIs.

The controller comes with NI-488.2 and NI-VISA driver software for Windows 2000/XP and works with NI LabView, LabWindows/CVI (ANSI C) and Measurement Studio for Visual Studio (Visual Basic/C/C++/C#) through the NI-VISA and NI-488.2 driver software.

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