NI offers excellent value for price with its new 8-bit digitizer

National Instruments (NI) announced that engineers can now use its PXI-5114 dual-channel, 8-bit digitizer, also known as a PC-based oscilloscope, for a broad range of high-speed validation and manufacturing test applications such as consumer electronics test and semiconductor component test. With prices starting at $2,995, this new digitizer offers an excellent value for the price with a broad range of functionality, added NI.

The PXI-5114 digitizer provides 250MS/s real-time and 5GS/s equivalent-time or random-interleaved sampling with 125MHz bandwidth for general-purpose time-domain digitization. The company said that engineers can use the module's deep on-board memory of up to 256MB/channel to store larger waveforms or to store more than 1 million records when using the multi-record acquisition mode. The digitizer also features a variety of triggering options, including SDTV/HDTV video triggering, and a wide set of input ranges from 40mV to 40V.

This new product is built on the NI Synchronization and Memory Core (SMC) architecture, a common foundation for NI digitizers, signal generators and digital waveform generator/analyzers. In addition to deep onboard memory, the SMC architecture also offers engineers high throughput and tight synchronization. SMC-based instruments achieve picosecond-level synchronization accuracy among multiple modules for building high-channel-count systems and creating mixed-signal applications.

As with other NI digitizers, engineers can use the new digitizer with arbitrary waveform generators and digital waveform generator/analyzers to build mixed-signal applications at any stage in a product's development.