12-bit analogue input board handles up to 20MHz

Measurement Computing Corporation (formerly ComputerBoards) has announced one of the fastest PC data acquisition boards in the world, and it's now available in the UK from Adept Scientific.

Measurement Computing Corporation (formerly ComputerBoards) has announced one of the fastest PC data acquisition boards in the world, and it's now available in the UK from Adept Scientific.

The PCI-DAS4020/12 is a four-channel, 12-bit resolution analogue input board which can handle sample rates up to 20MHz reliably.

Priced around £1100, the PCI-DAS4020/12 represents fine value for money.

The designers have given considerable thought to usability, with onboard BNC terminals and wide-ranging software support.

The package includes InstaCal software for installation, calibration and test, guiding the user through setup and automatically creating the board configuration file.

To ensure system timing is maintained at such high speeds, there's a powerful chip for the task, the System Timing Controller (STC).

This controls all the A/D sampling as well as the A/D FIFO buffer.

Along with bus-mastering and 'scatter-gather' functionality, the STC keeps the very high sample rates totally under control.

The PCI-DAS4020/12 has four A/D converters, enabling all four inputs to be sampled simultaneously without the channel-to-channel skew associated with multiplexed A/D.

The four 12-bit analogue inputs each have a 20MHz maximum sample rate.

Data can be written at full speed into the large 128ksample memory, or using PCI bus mastering continuous samples can be taken on two channels simultaneously at 20MHz, or on four channels at 10MHz.

Both analogue and digital input triggers and gates are supported, and these can be based on rising or falling edges, with the analogue trigger level set with 2.44mV resolution within the +/-5V trigger input range.

Pre-, post- and even about-trigger modes are available.

The PCI-DAS4020/12 also offers two 12-bit analogue output channels (software selectable as +/-5V or +/-10V) and a 24-bit digital I/O.

It is completely 'plug-and-play', with no switches, jumpers or potentiometers: everything is set through software, even calibration.

The ComputerBoards Universal Library I/O library and driver software is available for the board, so that in common with other hardware from the company, changing programming languages does not mean rewriting drivers, and applications can be moved around different boards.

The PCI-DAS4020/12 is supported by Agilent (formerly HP) VEE and VEE Lab, SoftWIRE, DAS-Wizard, and LabVIEW too.

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