NI releases its fastest data acquisition device

National Instruments PXI-5114 dual-channel device offers a broad range of high-speed validation and manufacturing test capabilities.

Engineers now can use the National Instruments’ PXI-5114 dual-channel, 8-bit digitizer–also known as a PC-based oscilloscope–for a broad range of high-speed validation and manufacturing test applications, such as consumer electronics test and semiconductor component test. Starting at $2,995, the new digitizer offers an excellent value for the price, with a broad range of functionality, the company says, and it’s the fastest data-acquisition device NI offers to date.It provides 250 MS/s real-time and 5 GS/s equivalent-time or random-interleaved sampling, with 125 MHz bandwidth for general-purpose time-domain digitization, NI says. Engineers can use the module’s deep onboard memory of up to 256 MB/channel to store larger waveforms or to store more than 1-million records when using the multi-record acquisition mode. The digitizer also features a variety of triggering options, including SDTV/HDTV video triggering, and input ranges from 40 mV to 40 V.The digitizer is built on the NI Synchronization and Memory Core (SMC) architecture, a common foundation for NI digitizers, signal generators, and digital waveform generator/analyzers. In addition to deep onboard memory, SMC architecture also offers engineers high throughput and tight synchronization, NI says. SMC-based instruments achieve picosecond-level synchronization accuracy among multiple modules for building high-channel-count systems and creating mixed-signal applications.As with other NI digitizers, engineers can use the new 250 MS/s digitizer with arbitrary waveform generators and digital waveform generator/analyzers to build mixed-signal applications at any stage in a product’s development–from design and validation to manufacturing test. All NI digitizers come with NI-Scope driver software, which works with other NI tools: LabView graphical development environment, SignalExpress interactive measurement software, Measurement Studio for Microsoft Visual Studio .Net, and LabWindows/CVI ANSI C development environment.

— Mark T. Hoske, editor-in-chief, Control Engineering MHoske@cfemedia.com

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