National Instruments has announced its X series multifunction data acquisition (DAQ) devices for PCI Express and PXI Express.

Unveiled at NIWeek, the devices, which integrate native PCI Express support, include up to 32 analogue inputs (AI), four analog outputs (AO), 48 digital I/O lines and four counters, range from low-cost 250ksample/s multiplexed AI to 2Msample/s simultaneous sampling AI.

Simultaneous X Series devices integrate up to 16 ADCs on a single device at 2Msample/s per channel, so engineers can sample all AI channels at a high rate and with minimal phase offset.

The benefit of PCI Express is it offers dedicated bandwidth to each device of up to 250Mbyte/s in each direction, as opposed to a PCI-to-PCI Express bridge interface, which limits the device bandwidth to that of the PCI bus.

The devices are optimised for low-latency I/O, which improves performance in control and single-point applications.

The company's STC3 timing technology provides devices with independent timing engines for the onboard analogue and digital I/O subsystems, so engineers can execute analogue and digital I/O independently at different rates or together with synchronisation.

X Series devices include four enhanced 32-bit counters for frequency, pulse-width modulation (PWM) and encoder operations and a new 100 MHz timebase that can generate analog and digital sampling rates with five times better resolution than previous devices.