National Instruments has expanded its digitiser product line with three digitisers/PC-based oscilloscopes. The 500MHz NI PXI-5153 and NI PCI-5153 and the 1GHz NI 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 take advantage of a complete line of high-speed digitisers – with 300 MHz, 500 MHz and 1 GHz bandwidths – for demanding automated test and streaming applications where high-bandwidth measurements are required.

All three products feature up to 256Mbytes of deep onboard memory per channel, providing accurate measurements by sustaining up to 2 GS/s real-time sampling rates over extended data capture windows. Engineers can use these digitisers to address a wide range of measurement needs in the consumer electronics, semiconductor, aerospace and defence and life sciences industries.

NI 515x digitisers are high-bandwidth digitisers with three characteristics that make them optimised for automated test – tight synchronisation between channels, ease of integration with other instrumentation and high data throughput. Using T-Clock technology, which synchronises multiple instruments, engineers can integrate NI 515x digitisers with a variety of NI hardware, including arbitrary waveform generators and digital waveform generator/analysers, to customise and build a complete, automated mixed-signal test system.

Engineers can also synchronise multiple digitisers to build systems with up to 34 channels in a single PXI chassis, all simultaneously sampling at 1 GS/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 digitisers’ high bandwidth, fast data throughput and tight multi-module synchronisation are beneficial for applications including mass spectrometry, radar, signal intelligence, non-destructive test and high-channel-count physics experimentation.

Engineers can combine the digitisers with NI LabVIEW SignalExpress interactive measurement software to quickly acquire data, perform measurements and view and analyse data in Microsoft Excel or NI DIAdem test management software.

Additionally, the NI 515x digitisers work with all National Instruments software including the NI LabVIEW graphical system design platform and the NI LabWindows/CVI ANSI C development environment as well as other development environments such as ANSI C, Microsoft C++ and Visual Basic.

More information: www.ni.com/digitizers/highspeed.