Simultaneous Sampling on Many Channels

Sample-and-hold building block a mid-range DAP board.

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By DE Editors

July 1, 2006

By DE Editors

Microstar Laboratories, Inc. Bellevue, WA has designed a mid-range data acquisition board to work well inmultiples for creating high-channel count systems that sample inputssimultaneously. Called the DAP 5380a/526, the new board is powered byan Intel Pentium 233MHz CPU and has 16 analog inputs and can acquire14-bit data at up to 800ksps per channel.

TheDAP 5380a/526 can sample eight channels simultaneously at 625ksps oneach channel, for an overall throughput of 5 million sps. If yourapplication requires faster sampling, you can choose a four-channelmode and sample up to four channels simultaneously at 800ksps on eachchannel for a maximum throughput of 3.2 million sps. The board has128MB of onboard memory for data buffers, and uses DMA bus-mastering totransfer data to the PC at up to 3.2 million sps.

Accordingto a press release, applications with more than eight simultaneouslysampled channels can take advantage of a built-in synchronizationfeature. If an application requires 16 simultaneous inputs, eachacquiring data at 625ksps, then two synchronized DAP 5380a/526 boards,installed in the same PC, can deliver an aggregate throughput of 10Msps shared by these sixteen simultaneous inputs. (An upgrade to two DAP5400a/627 boards would double the aggregate throughput to 20M sps.) Youalso can synchronize two or more boards across a network.

Each DAP5380a/526 includes a 233MHz Pentium processor. This processor runsDAPL, a multitasking real-time operating system optimized for dataacquisition and related control functions. You control this onboardintelligence from your PC with easy-to-use software or withapplications that you already know. The DAP can be configured andcontrolled from your PC with DAPstudio, a Windows application. You candownload a full version of DAPstudio to try it out for yourself and seehow easy it is to use.

DAPtools Standard includes options foralternative development paths using applications that you may alreadyknow. With these options, you can configure and control any DAP fromLabVIEW, DASYLab, MATLAB, C++, VB, and any applications that useDLLs.

TheDAP 5380a/526 board costs $3,995. DAPstudio costs $199. For moreinformation and free unrestricted versions of both hardware andsoftware for evaluation visit mstarlabs.com.

Sources: Press materials received from the company. Additional information gleaned from the company’s website.