Product category: Board-Level Instruments
News Release from: Alazar Technologies | Subject: ATS460 family
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial Team on 29 April 2005
Waveform digitisers reduce waiting time
The ATS460 family of 14bit PCI waveform digitisers is capable of sampling two simultaneous analogue inputs at rates up to 125Msample/s on each channel
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AlazarTech, the manufacturer of high performance, low cost PC based Instruments, today announced the launch of the ATS460 family of 14bit PCI waveform digitisers capable of sampling two simultaneous analogue inputs at rates up to 125Msample/s on each channel. This new PCI digitiser family is targeted for the needs of OEM customers and applications involving ultrasonic imaging and inspection, medical imaging, telecommunication test, manufacturing test and scientific research and development.
The ATS460 offers simultaneous sample rate up to 125Msample/s on two fully programmable analogue inputs per digitiser card, one 125Msample/s 14bit ADC per input, 8Msample of onboard memory and ability to synchronise up to eight digitisers to create a 16 channel 125Msample/s simultaneous sampling system.
'Customer feedback suggested that the market needed a well priced, high resolution PCI digitiser with the ability to acquire signals with very high PRF (pulse repeat frequency) for applications in ultrasonics, radar and medical imaging', stated Muneeb Khalid, President of AlazarTech.
'We responded by following our corporate strategy of providing 'more for less''.
'We designed the low-cost ATS460 family that uses the fastest available 14bit monolithic ADCs and also created a dual-port memory subsystem for signal storage that maximises PRF'.
Traditionally, users had to capture data into a digitiser's onboard memory and then transfer it to PC memory using DMA.
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No acquisition was possible while data transfer was taking place and vice-versa.
This scheme created a bottleneck in terms of pulse repeat frequency, as the re-arm time of the digitiser combined with Windows related software overheads placed a ceiling on how many triggers could be captured in a given period of time.
Using AlazarTech's optional dual-port memory that provides up to 8Msample of onboard storage per channel, very fast PRF rates are now possible, as acquired data can be transferred to host PC memory while acquisition is taking place.
Customers should see an average improvement of as much as 300% in the PRF that they can achieve using the ATS460 family.
ATS460 PCI digitiser family provides independently programmable input ranges from +/- 40mV to +/-20V, AC/DC coupling and 50ohm/1Mohm impedance on each of its two channels.
The sampling rate is also programmable from 125Msample/s down to 1Ksample/s.
Users can also capture transient 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.
An onboard high performance FPGA forms the heart of the ATS460 and can be customised for specific applications, such as digital down conversion (DDC), signal averaging, hardware FFT etc.
The ATS460 digitisers are accompanied by HyperDisP powered API Panel software that allows the user to set up the digitiser, acquire signals and view and store them without any software programming.
AlazarTech's HyperDisP technology allows the display of very long data records at lightning fast speeds, even under Windows or Linux environment.
OEMs can integrate the ATS460 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.
A Linux driver, ATS-Linux, is also available and supports kernel version up to 2.4.
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