Product category:
Board-Level Instruments
News Release from: Strategic Test | Subject: UltraFast UX3131
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial
Team on 04 June 2004
Four-channel PXI card is a speedy
sampler
The UltraFast UX3131 is billed as the industry's first 3U PXI card with four high-speed digitiser channels.
The UltraFast UX3131 is billed as the industry's first 3U PXI card with four high-speed digitiser channels With the release of this card, engineers and scientists can now acquire on all four channels at rates to 25Msample/s for sonar, lidar and ultrasonic measurements
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 4 Jul 2002 at 8.00am (UK)
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The UF.7021 is a full-length PCI board with 64 digital input or output channels that can simultaneously capture and replay signals at a maximum sample rate of 125Mbit/s.
The card combines the advantages of 12bit resolution, eight input ranges, programmable input offset, up to 64Msample memory and optional high-speed digital inputs on a single card.
"Our customers have been asking for a high performance card that allowed them to create high-channel count systems", stated Bob Giblett, President of Strategic Test.
"The design team created a card that not only packs four channels in a 3U form factor, but also managed to achieve a set of dynamic specifications that are best-in-class together with a feature set our customers demand".
Further reading
16bit acquisition cards for simultaneous sampling
A new series of data acquisition cards from Strategic Test has been designed for measurements that require simultaneous sampling at a maximum sampling rate of 1MHz.
Onboard RTOS puts card in charge of testing
The new MAX6pci data acquisition card can be configured with one or more MAX-PC CPU modules to handle time- or safety-critical tasks on a test rig.
Ultra-fast performance from arbitrary board
The UF6000 is a high-speed arbitrary waveform generator board from Strategic Test.
The UX3131 provides four input channels, each with a 12bit ADC for true simultaneous sampling, 25Msample/s maximum sampling rate on every channel, a 12.5MHz bandwidth, internal and external triggering and external clocking.
Each channel can be programmed with one of the eight input ranges +/-50mV to 10V and the input signal can also be offset adjusted by up to 100% of each range.
Together with the AC/DC coupling and a choice of 50ohm or 1Mohm impedances, the user is able to configure each input by software so that it is optimised for each signal source.
Like all of the UltraFast PXI, PCI and CompactPCI digitiser cards, the UX3131 sampling rate can be programmed from 1Ksample/s to the 25Msample/s maximum rate when using the onboard clock, or from DC to 25MHz when using an external clock signal - a feature often used to synchronise the card to external equipment.
In either case, the user is free to specify any sample rate within these ranges and the software driver will automatically adjust the onboard clock signal hardware divider and PLL to obtain the closest possible match.
As many digitiser cards limit the available sampling rate to a few preselected ranges, Strategic Test has created an application note that describes its technology in greater detail.
AN_01 can be downloaded from the company's website.
The UX3131 can record signals to onboard memory or continuously transfer the digitised data gap-free across the PXI bus to the PC host at up to 100Mbyte/s.
There is an extensive list of available options.
Apart from expanding the onboard memory from the standard 8Msample up to 64Msample in various increments, there is the multiple recording option for recording a series of waveforms at very high speed (over 20,000 per second are possible), gated sampling that starts and stops the recording when an external TTL signal changes level and a high-speed digital inputs option that allows 16 TTL or CMOS level signals to be acquired at the same speed as the ADCs, a feature often used to record high-speed events or status information from other equipment.
Software drivers for Windows XP, 2000, NT, Me, 98 and Linux are supplied, while drivers for Matlab, LabView, Agilent's-VEE and DasyLab are available as cost-options.
Strategic Test also includes its SBench measurement/oscilloscopes program running under Microsoft Windows.
This supports all of the UX3131's features.
Signals can be recorded and displayed graphically then cursors used to make graphical analysis such as measuring peak values.
Statistical calculations and FFTs can be performed on the data.
More sophisticated analysis can be performed created using third-party programs, such as Matlab by exporting the signal data as ASCII/text files.
The UltraFast UX3131 with 16Mbyte memory costs $8036, with 32Mbyte $8960, 64Mbyte $10,031, and 128Mbyte $11,256.
Prices are based on the current Euro/US dollar exchange rate.
OEM prices are available on request.
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