E-Spectrum Motherboard Series Digitizers Offering

It follows that the higher the figure the better the quality of the signal.

Historically, modern digitizers date from the 1950s and 60s when the need to rapidly acquire, store, and process multiple channels of data became evident.

Most early digitizers were built on NIM (Nuclear Instrumentation Module) or CAMAC (Computer Automated Measurement And Control ) interface standards.

These are standard bus and modular crate electronics standards for data acquisition and control used in nuclear and particle physics experiments.

The creation of a standard instrument interface bus(GPIBIEEE 488) in the 1970s laid the foundation for multi instrument test and measurement systems.

Concurrently the development of personal computers led to a number of standard computer interfaces such as PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect )and VMEbus (VersaModular Eurocard bus) providing a standard interface to interconnect peripheral devices within a computer.

These computer buses were adapted to support modular instruments by the creation of a number of modular instrument interface buses such as PXI (PCI eXtensions for Instrumentation) and VXI (VME eXtensions for Instrumentation).

The increasing need to reduce test time and data though put resulted in the development of the LXI (LAN eXtensions for Instrumentation) Standard for test system integration.

So, all the elements for fast multichannel instrumentation systems are in place.

E-Spectrum Motherboard Series Digitizers Offering

Figure 1 shows an example, the Spectrum M4i series digitizers offering 2 or 4 channels with a sample rate of up to 500 MSs and up to 16 bits of resolution with a PCI Express x8 Gen2 interface which supports transfer rates of up to 3.4 GBytess.

Table 1 contains a glossary of common digitizer specifications and terms.

The depth of the digitizers acquisition memory determines the length of a signal that may be stored in the buffer before it must be transferred for processing, display, or saved.

Longer memory also allows for a higher sampling rate over extended record times.

Bandwidth is typically measured as the frequency (in Hertz) where the signal amplitude falls to half the power (-3 dB) of the signal at a low frequency.

A large dynamic range allows for the measurement of signals that contain both small and large voltage components at the same time.

Unfortunately, all real ADC circuits and their associated pre-amplifiers introduce some noise and distortion reducing the ideal number of quantized levels.

Effective number of bits (ENOB) is a quality measure of the dynamic performance of an analog-to-digital converter (ADC) and its associated circuitry.

ENOB specifies the resolution of an ideal ADC circuit that would have the same resolution as the digitizer being specified.

A local area network based system integration standard allowing fast communication between multiple instruments.

It is a characteristic of all electronic circuits, which generally add noise to the signal being processed.

These interfaces are primarily used for modular digitizers that are installed in the chassis of a computer.

This standard forms a basis for building electronic test equipment by providing clock and trigger synchronization signals.

Resolution is important for measuring dynamic signals and small signals.

Effective measurement requires the sample rate of a digitizer to be least twice the frequency of the highest signal frequency, this is called the Nyquist rate.

Common signal processing applications include filtering, averaging, and spectrum analysis.

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