Spectrum Instruments introduces two new PCIe digitizer cards

     Spectrum Instruments has announced the launch of two new PCIe digitizer cards. The new products upgrade the company's flagship M5i series with superior GHz signal acquisition and analysis capabilities. The new single-channel and dual-channel offerings not only boast ultra-fast sampling rates of 10GS/s and 12-bit vertical resolution, but also deliver industry-leading transfer speeds of 12.8GB/s (via PCIe bus). Spectrum instruments incorporate 16-channel, Gen3 and PCIe technologies to achieve optimal flow rates. After data collection, it can be directly transmitted to PC memory for storage, or sent to CPU and GPU for customized signal processing and analysis. The new product has more than 3GHz front-end circuit bandwidth and up to 16GB of on-board memory (8GSamples). These exceptional features make the new PCIe Digitizer card a powerful tool kit for engineers and scientists processing electronic signals in the GHz range.

     The 12-bit resolution digitizer is innovative and has a dynamic range far superior to most conventional test instruments. For example, the new product has 16 times the resolution of most digital oscilloscopes that use 8-bit analog-to-digital converters. The added resolution significantly improves the accuracy of signal-to-noise ratio measurements and enables users to capture and describe signal details often missed by low-resolution devices.

     The new products can handle a variety of signals, including communication, semiconductor testing, spectroscopy, optical systems and quantum physics. The new product has a front-end circuit bandwidth of over 3GHz, a full programmable range of ±200 mV to ± 2.5V with variable offset. Typically, new products are capable of signal acquisition in monopulse or multi-waveform recording mode. Multiple logging divides on-board memory into multiple partitions, allowing a large number of events to be obtained even under particularly high trigger rates. It is ideal for situations encountered in serial bus testing or devices that use the stimulus response process, such as those found in LIDAR and RADAR systems. To increase the flexibility of the new product, the on-board memory can be used as a ring buffer like a traditional oscilloscope, or as a FIFO buffer for continuous data transmission to the PC.

     There are many trigger modes for channels and external trigger inputs in order to capture hard-to-capture signals. These patterns include traditional edge triggers, as well as complex approaches such as Window, Re-Arm, Or/And (logical), software, and latency. Triggering is the storage of fast and accurate waveform data with associated trigger timestamp data. The front panel has SMA connectors for channel input, clock and flip-flop input and output, and four multifunctional digital I/O cables. Additional clock and trigger connections are provided to synchronize the card with additional digitizers or other measuring equipment.

     A new product installed in the right PCIe slot can turn almost any computer into a powerful measurement tool in an instant. This also opens the door to signal processing and analysis using the latest CPU and GPU hardware. These memory cards come equipped with all the tools needed to run on Windows or Linux operating systems. Software development kits (SDKS) work with almost any major programming language, including C, C++, C#, Delphi, VB.NET, J#, Python, Julia, Java, LabVIEW, and MATLAB. The SDK contains all the required driver libraries as well as programming examples. In addition, Spectrum Instruments offers SBench 6 Pro if customers don't want to write their own code. This powerful software not only helps customers achieve complete control, but also comes with a wealth of data display, analysis, storage and documentation capabilities.

     All Spectrum Instruments PCIe cards can transfer data directly to the CUDA GPU through the company's SCAPP toolkit (Spectrum CUDA Parallel Processing Access), which is very cost effective. SCAPP includes drivers that support CUDA Gpus and allow users to develop their own processing flows. To lower barriers to entry, the SCAPP toolkit provides examples that can be modified and built. It is ideal for customers dealing with intensive data, such as continuous averaging for noise reduction, or MPoint-FFTs for spectral analysis.

     Another option for the new card is on-board summing average (option M5i.33xx-spavg). Averaging is a very powerful tool that can be used to reduce unnecessary signal noise. At the same time, it improves measurement resolution beyond the 12-bit performance of standard digitizers, and provides better dynamic range and signal-to-noise ratio. This option uses on-board FPGA(Field Programmable Gate Array) technology on the card to average the waveform even at full 10GS/s sampling. Ultimately, this makes the new product one of the fastest signal averaging solutions on the market, with speeds averaging up to 15 million events per second, due to the extremely short dead interval between events, less than 40 nanoseconds!

     "These newly introduced digitizer cards represent a significant technological advance for Spectrum instruments," said Oliver Rovini, Chief Technology Officer. The significant increase in sampling rate and bandwidth allows us to reach a wider market. For example, as more engineers and scientists need to capture and describe waveforms in the GHz range, or pulses with edge speeds of subnanoseconds, we can support them. The new product is easy to use and very flexible, and can handle almost any signal. It could be a low-level pulse from a reflected laser source, or it could be a high-speed communication signal involving some sophisticated modulation technique."

     Like all Spectrum Instruments products, the M5I.33350-X16 and M5i.3357-x16 come with a five-year warranty. Our team of engineers will provide free software and firmware updates to our customers throughout the life of the product. There are 5 models of M5i.33xx series to choose from. Users can choose between single or dual channels, as well as sampling rates of 3.2GS/s, 6.4GS/s, or 10 GS/s, and bandwidth of 1GHz, 2GHz, or 3 GHz