Product category: Board-Level Instruments
News Release from: Spectrum Systementwicklung Microelectronic | Subject: M2i card series
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial Team on 20 February 2007
PC-based instruments move
up to 64bit Vista
Spectrum has released 64bit Windows drivers for its range of more than 70 PCI/PCI-X digitisers, waveform generators and digital I/O cards
Spectrum has announced the availability of the new 64bit Windows drivers (Windows Vista and XP) for its range of more than 70 PCI/PCI-X digitisers, waveform generators and digital I/O cards. The state-of-the-art M2i card series can now be used under the 32bit versions of Windows 2000, XP and Vista as well as Windows XP and Vista 64bit.
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The M2i product range consists of digitisers starting with 16 channels, 16bit resolution and 100Ksample/s sampling rate up to versions with 12bit resolution and 200Msample/s, arbitrary waveform generators (AWG) with up to 125Msample/s and digital I/O cards with up to 125Msample/s.
The 64bit versions of Windows have two distinct advantages over the 32bit versions.
In the first case 64bit Windows delivers a higher performance for users undertaking computation-intensive tasks like real-time analysis of acquired data or on-the-fly signal generation.
Further reading
LabView drivers make the most of board range
Spectrum has produced all-new LabView drivers for its M2i series of fast PCI/PCI-X cards
Secondly, the 64bit Windows versions support clearly more memory than the 32bit versions.
32bit Windows can address a maximum of 4Gbyte of memory of which one part is reserved for the kernel and another part as address space for bus extensions.
As a maximum there are 3.5Gbyte available for application data.
Compared with this, the theoretical available address space of a 64bit system is 16Ebyte (4G x 4Gbyte).
The physical maximum of memory depends on the motherboard and the Windows version and is usually around 128Gbyte.
The use of the 64bit driver version can extremely extend the usable memory of Spectrum digitisers and AWGs without the need of a cost-intensive onboard memory upgrade.
Most of the PC instruments on the market can only use the onboard memory for data storage and need to transfer data after the end of the acquisition to PC.
The Spectrum instruments instead allow the continuous data transfer to PC memory with a transfer speed of up to 220Mbyte/s (PCI-X slot) while doing acquisition.
Assuming a recording of two channels at 100Msample/s and 8bit resolution (M2i.2030) a total of 190Mbyte have to be stored per second.
A Windows 32bit system is only able to record a maximum of approximately 18 seconds even when equipped with full 4Gbyte of memory.
Compared with this a Windows 64bit version is able to record several minutes of data.
The 64bit support of the M2i cards also allows to use older 32bit programs - thus without the advantage of the extended address space.
The Spectrum 64bit Windows drivers support the common Spectrum API making card programming identical under Windows 32bit and 64bit as well as under Linux 32bit and 64bit.
A change from a 32bit Windows version to its 64bit pendant therefore is only a question of simple recompilation.
The 64bit Windows drivers can be downloaded free-of-charge from the Spectrum homepage. Request a free brochure from Spectrum Systementwicklung Microelectronic....
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