Agilent's compact, low-power digitiser maximises measurement throughput

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Agilent Technologies has introduced its first digitiser from the Acqiris product line which it acquired in November 2006.

Designed in a standard short PCI card format, the compact digitiser combines data converter ASIC technology with a high level of component integration for significantly reduced power consumption of less than 15 W. It can be used in all standard PCI bus slots and is ideal for a variety of test applications.

With the optional SAR mode, the onboard memory is separated into multiple buffers. As data is acquired into one buffer, another can be read out through the 32 bit/64 MHz PCI at up to 250 MB/s. In applications where the total data rate of the acquisition is below the PCI data bandwidth, the digitiser with SAR mode can acquire continuously, missing zero events.

The 8 bit, dual-channel DP1400 features an analog front end containing both signal conditioning and high-speed analog-to-digital converter (ADC) components. Both inputs provide an AC- and DC-coupled digitising channel with 50Ω input impedance.

The real-time sampling rate of up to 1 GS/s on each channel can be increased up to 2 GS/s real-time sampling in single-channel mode by interleaving the ADCs. The standard 256kpoints of onboard memory can be segmented for burst mode acquisitions with an impressive 350 ns of inter-segment dead time.

When more than two data acquisition channels are required, the digitisers can be synchronised using the 2 GHz auto-synchronisation bus (AS Bus 2), a proprietary, high-bandwidth bus system to connect multiple digitisers. The AS Bus 2 distributes both the clock and trigger signals among all the digitisers that participate in the system, allowing any digitiser to generate the trigger while the central digitiser acts as the common synchronous clock source.