Digitizer card streams in four lanes
-- Test & Measurement World, 10/1/2007
The ATS9462 PCI Express (PCIe) digitizer card from AlazarTech has no onboard memory because it doesn’t need any. Using four PCIe lanes, the card can stream data to PC memory at a sustained rate of 720 Mbytes/s. That’s fast enough to keep pace with the card’s two 180-Msample/s analog input channels.
As with other four-lane PCIe cards, you can plug the ATS9462 into any available four, eight, or 16-lane PCIe slot. Sample rates range from 1 ksample/s to 180 Msamples/s. Digitizer inputs have 16-bit resolution and 65-MHz bandwidth. Input voltage range is ±200 mV to ±16 V. DC accuracy is ±2% of range for all input ranges. Input impedance is 1 MW but you can change that to 50 W for RF applications using a DIP switch on the card.
The ATS9462 uses two trigger engines, called X and Y. You can combine the two engines using logical OR, AND, or XOR operands, then specify the number of records to capture in an acquisition, the length of each record, and the amount of pretrigger data.
The card includes software that lets you operate the card, acquire data, and store data. Optional software-development kits are available for C/C++, Visual Basic, LabView, and Linux.
Price $4995. AlazarTech, www.alazartech.com.
