Strategic Test has announced two new 500Msamples/s 12bit digitiser cards for the PCI bus. The UF3-3242 has two analogue inputs and can sample at 500Msamples/s on one channel or 250Msamples/s on both channels simultaneously. The UF3-3240 is a single-channel card that samples at up to 500Msamples/s. Both cards are supplied with 128Msamples (256Mbytes) onboard memory.
The memory can be expanded to 2Gsamples giving a measurement time of up to five seconds on one channel at 500Msamples/s. Measured dynamic specifications at 500Msamples/s are a SNR (signal-to-noise ratio) of up to 63.1dB and an ENOB (effective number of bits ) value of 10.2 LSB. At 250 Msamples/s the SNR is up to 63.8dB and an ENOB of 10.3 LSB.
These cards are part of the new UF3 series, which is based on a new baseboard design. This series features five multi-purpose connectors routed to the clock input, trigger input, trigger output and two freely programmable I/O connections. Two digital I/O lines allow them to be programmed as digital inputs that are synchronous with the analogue channels or as synchronous digital I/O lines used to control external equipment or receive status signals, or as additional trigger inputs that can be AND/OR with the main external trigger input.
Each channel includes its own ADC for simultaneous sampling without phase errors. There are two user-selectable input paths per channel on the card. The first path has six input ranges from ±200mV to ±10V and a choice of 50Ohm or 1MOhm input impedances. The second path delivers a bandwidth of more than 200MHz, has four input ranges from ±500mV to ±5V and has 50Ohm impedance. The new front-end module allows AC or DC coupling and includes a user-activated low-pass filter.
These scope cards can be customised with hardware options to match the application. These cards have an onboard memory of 128, 256, 512, 1024 or 2048 mega samples. Other features include: multiple recording/memory segmentation; TimeBase that records time of trigger events; Star hub that enables synchronisation of up to eight boards. It can be used with digitiser, AWG and digital I/O boards to create mixed-mode systems. The BaseXIO feature adds eight asynchronous digital I/O lines.
Drivers and programming examples for Microsoft Windows 7, Vista, XP64, XP and Linux (RedHat, Fedora, SuSe, Sarge) are supplied with the card, as well as the SBench 6.0 oscilloscope program. SDK's for MATLAB, LabVIEW and LabWindows/CVI are available as options.
