National Instruments expands digitiser range

The 500MHz PXI-5153 and PCI-5153, plus the 1GHz PCI-5154 modules round out the NI 515x series of digitisers, following the introduction of the NI PXI-5154 in July.

With the NI 515x series, engineers can use a complete line of high-speed digitisers with 300MHz, 500MHz and 1GHz bandwidths for demanding automated test and streaming applications.

All three products feature up to 256MB of deep onboard memory per channel, providing accurate measurements by sustaining up to 2GS/s real-time sampling rates over extended data capture windows.

'High-bandwidth measurements are a complicated and expensive part of any automated test system,' said Ray Morgan, senior product engineer at On Semiconductor.

'With the 1GHz PXI-5154 digitiser and the 2.7GHz PXI-2547 8x1 high-frequency multiplexer, we created a low-cost 16-channel oscilloscope.

'The 1GHz digitiser in the modular format has helped us test our new high-bandwidth products at a fraction of our previous test times.' The NI 515x digitisers offer three characteristics that make them optimised for automated testing: tight synchronisation between channels, ease of integration with other instrumentation and high data throughput.

Using T-clock technology, which synchronises multiple instruments, the digitisers can be integrated with a variety of NI hardware to customise and build a complete, automated mixed-signal test system.

Multiple digitisers can be synchronised to build systems with up to 34 channels in a single PXI chassis, all simultaneously sampling at 1GS/s and synchronised to picosecond-level accuracy between modules.

The PXI platform, upon which NI high-speed digitisers are built, provides measurement throughput up to 10-times faster than alternative instrument architectures because of the high-bandwidth and low-latency PCI bus.

The features of these digitisers can be beneficial for applications including mass spectrometry, radar, signal intelligence and high-channel-count physics experimentation.

Engineers can combine the digitisers with NI Labview Signalexpress interactive measurement software to acquire data, perform measurements and view and analyse data in Microsoft Excel or NI Diadem test management software.

Additionally, the 515x digitisers work with all National Instruments software as well as other development environments such as ANSI C, Microsoft C++ and Visual Basic.