National Instruments and Tektronix used the recent NIWeek conference in Austin, Texas, to announce the joint development of a high-speed digitizer that’s a real breakthrough for test, measurement, and monitoring instrumentation. The new product, a PXI digitizer for NI’s popular modular instrumentation product line, provides a huge increase in performance over currently available PXI digitizers, most of which top out at 1 Gsample/s with a 500- or 1000-MHz bandwidth.

The 8-bit digitizer offers a 3-GHz bandwith with a sample rate beyond 10 Gsamples/s and data throughput of more than 600 Mbytes. It includes two channels per module and can synchronize up to 100 channels or more. Because of this collaborative development effort, engineers and scientists will experience a new level of measurement performance and test productivity in demanding high-speed applications such as those found in cellular and wireless test, physics and experimental research, aerospace and defense, network communications, and the semiconductor and consumer electronics industries. It also will certainly open the door to lower-cost modular automated test options for cellular and wireless products.

“We have worked for many years to deliver productivity improvements to engineers in automated test through LabVIEW and PXI, and this new module represents the highest-performance acquisition capability that we’ve delivered in this platform to date,” said James Truchard, National Instruments president, CEO, and cofounder.

National Instruments and Tektronix have been collaborating on various projects for more than 20 years. This digitizer represents their first joint hardware development project and takes advantage of the strengths of both to deliver advanced performance for demanding applications. Proprietary Tektronix ASICs and design expertise provide the basis for high-speed signal acquisition with low noise and high linearity, delivering superior signal integrity. National Instruments’ contribution is in graphical system design software and proprietary Synchronization and Memory Core (SMC) expertise in PC-based instrumentation. The combination offers high data throughput for faster test execution and precision multi-module timing and synchronization capability for building high-channel-count and integrated test systems.

The new digitizer joins a family of PXI products designed for high measurement throughput using high-bandwidth and low-latency PCI and PCI Express bus technologies. Engineers and scientists can integrate NI digitizers into test systems comprising any of the more than 1500 instruments available for the PXI platform, ranging from precision dc to RF. The digitizer will integrate PXI instruments with LabVIEW, NI’s industry-standard software for instrument control and automation, the NI LabWindows/CVI ANSI C software development environment, and Microsoft Visual Studio .NET development tools.

The first shipments of the new digitizer will be available from National Instruments in 2010. For more information on the National Instruments and Tektronix relationship, go to www.ni.com/tek.

National Instruments

NIWeek

Tektronix