125Msample/s PCI digitizers will be modular, multi-channel

Plug-in digitizer maker Gage Applied Technologies is pre-announcing a family of multi-channel digitizers dubbed the Octopus family. These single-slot PCI digitizers, when they debut for real next year, will feature up to eight channels, and up to 4GB of on-board acquisition memory. They will operate at sampling speeds up to 125Msamples/s/channel.

The digitizers will also be modular. You will be able to customize one by choosing from two to eight digitizing channels with choice of 12-bit or 14-bit resolution. The company will also be pricing these products at a cost of less than $1,000/channel.

FPGA options
Optionally available on any of the Octopus digitizers will be Gage's eXpert on-board FPGA-based (field programmable gate arrays) technologies. These include FIR (finite impulse response filtering), FFTs (fast Fourier transforms), signal averaging, and peak detection. The eXpert FPGAs let you perform on-the-fly data analysis. They also increase the speed of data processing.

The Octopus family of digitizers will also be compatible with Gage's GageScope oscilloscope software. Running on Windows boxes, it lets you acquire and analyze signals, without writing any programming code. Gage also offers SDKs (software development kits) for those of you programming in C, C#, MATLAB, LabVIEW, and LabWindows/CVI.

- Alex Mendelsohn
eeProductCenter