Spectrum Instrumentation added two 8-channel cards to their 65 Series of PCIe Arbitrary Waveform Generators (AWG), which when used with Spectrum's Star-Hub, can integrate up to 80 channels in a single PC. All cards in the Series offer an on-board memory of 512 MSamples to store and replay waveforms, and using the PCIe-x4 platform, can provide a data transfer speed up to five to 10 times higher than other solutions, with 700 MByte/s of FIFO streaming speed.

Applications include component testing, automotive, robotics, aerospace, medical and industrial ultrasound, LIDAR, radar and sonar. According to Oliver Rovini, Spectrum's CTO, "This family of AWG cards has the lowest noise of any AWGs that we have so far designed, being more than 20 percent lower when compared to our predecessor AWG families. In addition, these cards now have 16-bit resolution and a clock being 20 times more accurate at only ±1 ppm. We already have a university research department using an AWG to control the placement of individual atoms."

The two additions are the M2p.6533-x4 (priced at $6,570) with eight 40 MS/s channels, and the M2p.6568-x4 (priced at $8,900) that can be configured with eight channels of 80 MS/s or four of 125 MS/s. The eight-channel versions are equipped with an additional cooling system, making them two slots wide. All eight models of the M2p.65xx series are half-length PCIe cards and only 168 mm in length. The maximum output swing, even with the eight channel versions, is ±6 V into 1 MOhm or ±3 V into 50 Ohms.

The cards are shipped with Spectrum's SBench 6 control software for out-of-the-box operation for card control and signal generation. For applications that require the connection of AWGs and Digitizers, such as stimulus-response or closed-loop applications, Spectrum's Star-Hub piggy-back module synchronizes up to 16 different M2p class products. The M2p.59xx digitizers offer one to eight channels with sampling rates between 20 MS/s and 125 MS/s. The Star-Hub distributes a common clock and all trigger signals to each card ensuring fully synchronous operation.

The cards are fully programmable and drivers are provided, free of charge, to support the most popular languages (such as C++, VB.NET, C#, J#, Delphi, Java or Python) as well as third-party software tools like LabVIEW and MATLAB. Alternatively, users can simply run Spectrum's own software, SBench 6 Professional. The front panel also hosts four multi-function MMCX connectors, which can be used for different tasks such as additional digital output channels (marker channels), clock, trigger or status output as well as asynchronous I/O lines.

Learn more at www.spectrum-instrumentation.com.