AlazarTech: New PCI-based waveform digitizer lowers pricing
Providing high sampling rates (up to 50 MS/s) "on two simultaneous channels with a fully programmable front-end and trigger circuitry" is how AlazarTech—a manufacturer of PC-based instruments—describes its recently launched 8-bit ATS850 PCI-based waveform digitizer.
Providing high sampling rates (up to 50 MS/s) “on two simultaneous channels with a fully programmable front-end and trigger circuitry” is how AlazarTech —a manufacturer of PC-based instruments—describes its recently launched 8-bit ATS850 PCI-based waveform digitizer. A major challenge for developing ATS850 was to hold pricing low enough to justify a buy-versus-build decision for customers intending to embed a waveform digitizer into their equipment. Use of the company’s Acquisition System on Programmable Chip (ASoPC) technology helped meet that goal, according to Muneeb Khalid, president of AlazarTech. “ATS850 outperforms waveform digitizers that are more than twice its price,” he says.
ATS850 digitizer offers independently programmable input ranges from
ATS850 features Multiple Record mode with pre- and post-trigger capability that permits capturing signals from rapidly occurring triggers. A 40-bit time stamp allows users to record each trigger event relative to all other triggers in a given session. Sampling rate is also programmable from 50 MS/s down to 10 KS/s. The digitizer comes in two versions: a standard model with 256K points of acquisition memory per channel (available now, priced at $995) and a high-memory model with 16M points per channel available in Q104.
ATScope software complements the digitizer, allowing users to set up the device, acquire signals, and view/store signals without writing any programming code. OEMs can integrate ATS850 into their systems via ATS-SDK Software Development Kit that’s Microsoft Windows XP/2000/98SE-compatible. The kit includes sample programs written in C/C++ and VisualBasic. A LabView VI is also available.
—Frank J. Bartos, executive editor, Control Engineering, fbartos@reedbusiness.com
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