Ultraview unveils AD8-3000 range of PCIe boards

Ultraview, a provider of fast data-acquisition boards, has introduced an ultra-fast PCIe data-acquisition board series allowing uninterrupted acquisition of two concurrent 3GSPS 8-bit A/D channels.

The AD8-3000's combination of speed, reconfigurable processing and very deep onboard memory enables new data-acquisition capabilities in signals intelligence, surveillance, missile testing and radars, as well as other defence, scientific and medical applications, according to the company.

When installed in an x16 PCIe slot, the AD8-3000 can acquire data at an aggregate rate up to 6Gb/s, optionally process it in the onboard Virtex-5 FPGA, buffer it in the 8Gb onboard DDR-II RAM and continuously stream the data via 1.4Gb/s PCIe x8 DMA transfers to host system RAM, for immediate use, graphical display or storage to disk.

A selective recording feature allows acquisition to be dynamically stopped and started in response to a TTL input, increasing effective memory depth by only storing the needed data, for radar, burst-communication and pulsed-spectroscopy applications.

Designed for high-speed, low-jitter operation in critical original-equipment-manufacturer (OEM) applications, the AD8-3000 allows either straight data acquisition, requiring no user development, or inline FPGA dataflow processing using the onboard Xilinx Virtex-5 (XC5VLX50T or any 1136-pin Virtex-5 up to XC5VLX155T).

For use as a standard data-acquisition board, the supplied user software and device driver allow users to acquire and view data, with only a few minutes required to set up the board.

Drivers, user software and an example user source code are supplied for both 64-bit Linux and 32-bit Windows Vista/XP.

Graphical waveform display software and routines to store data to disk are included with all boards in C-language source and ready-to-run executable form.

The AD8-3000's host-uploadable firmware feature is intended to let users reconfigure the onboard FPGA through the host system's PCIe bus without a programming cable.

This allows users to quickly - and even remotely - modify the board's supplied standard data-acquisition VHDL firmware to perform advanced application-specific hardware signal processing, including filtering, sub-band tuning, averaging, spectroscopy, SDR and image processing.

This modular VHDL firmware source is available to OEM users.

For OEM applications, user-/Ultraview-designed front-end mezzanines may be attached to the board, including higher-resolution A/D and D/A converters, filters, amplifiers and mixers.

Dr Joel Libove, Ultraview's president, said: 'The AD8-3000 is designed to address requirements for the highest-performance data-acquisition systems.

'It is an effective standalone system on a board that will also be used as a component in systems configured by other manufacturers,' he added.

Multiple, concurrently triggered AD8-3000 boards may be ganged to acquire multiple channels in lock step.

For example, with four AD8-3000x2-8Gbs and an AD8-Split4 clock/trigger splitter, eight A/D channels can be acquired concurrently at 3GSPS each for a 24GSPS aggregate rate, with 4Gb of acquisition depth on each channel.

The 8Gb dedicated RAM on each AD8-3000 allows ultra-fast single-shot capture without requirements on host system bus throughput.

The AD8-3000 supports external clocks of 500MHz to 1,500MHz (sampling rates of 1GSPS to 3GSPS) and has a 2GSPS internal clock (with other frequencies available).

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