The PX1500-2 PCIe-based wideband A/D board from Signatec captures two synchronised analogue channels at sampling rates up to 1.5GHz, or one channel up to 3GHz when interleaving the ADC data. The 1Gbyte of on-board memory, configured as a large FIFO, and a PCIe x8 bus ensures that the digitiser can continuously sustain long recordings at up to 1.4Gbyte/s through the PCIe x8 bus (both mechanical and electrical) to PC disk storage without any break in the analogue record. The digitiser can be set up to use either a transformer-coupled front end or an amplifier connection. The transformer connection can only be set for AC-coupled operation and has a frequency capture range of 5MHz to 2GHz. The amplifier can be set for either AC-coupled or DC-coupled operation with a frequency range of up to 1GHz. The digitizer's frequency synthesised clock allows the ADC sampling rate to be set to virtually any value from 200MHz. Additional divide-by-two circuits are provided for sampling at lower frequencies. This frequency selection flexibility comes at no cost to the acquisition clock in terms of quality and performance, says the company, when locked to either the onboard 10MHz, 5PPM reference clock or to an externally provided 10MHz reference clock.
