Product category:
Board-Level Instruments
News Release from: Strategic Test | Subject: UltraFast range
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial
Team on 27 September 2006
PC-based instruments upgrade to 64bit
Windows
Strategic Test Corporation has announced the new Windows XP Pro 64bit driver for its range of digitiser, AWG, fast digital I/O and digital pattern generator cards.
Strategic Test Corporation has announced the new Windows XP Pro 64bit driver for its range of digitiser, AWG, fast digital I/O and digital pattern generator cards The driver is compatible with all of the 150 different PCI/PCI-X, PXI and CompactPCI products in the UltraFast range
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 25 Feb 2003 at 8.00am (UK)
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There are two distinct advantages to 64bit Windows over 32bit.
In the first case, 64bit Windows delivers a higher computation performance that is a particular benefit to engineers and scientists who undertake real-time analysis of measurement data or signal processing.
Secondly, 64bit Windows supports up to 128Gbyte of PC RAM compared with the 4Gbyte of 32bit Windows XP.
This means that if the digitiser or AWG card supports streaming, the signal data to/from the host-PC RAM and the total recording/replay rate is lower than the data transfer bandwidth of the PCIbus used, then the engineer can use the low-cost PC-memory instead of buying expensive instrument memory.
This method also allows longer recording/replay times, as the maximum amount of signal memory that can be added to the current range of digitiser or AWG cards from most vendors is 4Gbyte.
To illustrate this further, a digitiser card with two 100Msample/s 8bit A/D channels will quantise the signals at a rate of 200Mbyte/s.
In order for this data to be transferred continuously and gap-free to the host-PC memory, the PCIbus would need to support this data transfer rate.
Assuming that the card is based on the 66MHz/32bit PCIbus (also known as PCI-X) that is available on newer products, this bus supports continuous data transfer rates of up to 225Mbyte/s and therefore can be used to stream the data in this example.
Using 32bit Windows XP Pro, the maximum measurement time would be limited by the 3.5Gbyte useable memory giving a maximum time of 17.5s.
However, on a PC configured with 128Gbyte RAM running 64bit Windows XP Pro, the measurement time would increase to over 6.5min.
The Windows XP Pro x64 driver is 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.
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