PXI digitizers offer high-speed signal acquisition

The NI PXIe-5186 digitizer employs Tektronix's Enabling Technology to offer up to 5GHz bandwidth and 12.5GS/s sample rates. The other digitizer, the NI PXIe-5185, offers 3GHz bandwidth along with 12.5GS/s sample rate.

Both digitizers are part of NI's PXI-based hardware and software platform which "...further demonstrate the impact of Moore's Law on test applications, bringing higher performance to smaller footprints such as PXI," said James Truchard, NI president, CEO and cofounder.

He said an example of the superior signal fidelity delivered by Tektronix Enabling Technology is the incredibly low sampling jitter of the digitizer. The very low 500fs RMS integrated jitter of the digitizers is said to result in a remarkable 5.5 effective number of bits (ENOB) at 5GHz.

Truchard said NI's proprietary technology delivers high-data throughput for faster test execution and precision multi-module timing and synchronisation for building high-channel-count, integrated test systems.

Designed to optimise performance for automated test applications, especially for the 3U PXI Express platform, the digitizers offer stream rates as fast as 700MB/s and synchronise channels on multiple modules to within 160ps resolution.

These capabilities aim at target applications such as automated production test, semiconductor ATE and high-energy physics measurement systems.

The digitizers work with NI LabVIEW graphical design software for instrument control and automation, the NI LabWindows/ CVI ANSI C software development environment and Microsoft Visual Studio.NET development tools for a wide range of programming options.

Engineers can program the digitizers using the NI-SCOPE instrument driver or the new LabVIEW Jitter Analysis Toolkit, which offers a library of functions optimised for high-throughput, jitter, eye diagram and phase noise measurements.