NATIONAL Instruments has released the industry’s highest bandwidth PXI digitiser, which was co-developed with Tektronix.
The NI PXIe-5186 digitiser achieves up to 5GHz bandwidth and 12.5GS/s sample rates.
The company has also announced the NI PXIe-5185 which has a 3GHz bandwidth along with 12.5 GS/s sample rate.
According to NI, Tektronix brought its high-speed digitisation capabilities to the table, while NI specialised in software-defined instrumentation.
Proprietary Tektronix performance oscilloscope ASICs in the new digitisers provide the foundation for high-speed signal acquisition with low noise and high linearity. They are based on the IBM 7HP SiGe process.
As a result of the Tektronix technology, the digitiser has very low sampling jitter. The 500fs RMS integrated jitter results in 5.5 effective number of bits (ENOB) at 5 GHz.
Meanwhile, NI’s proprietary technology delivers high-data throughput for faster test execution and precision multimodule timing and synchronisation for building high-channel-count, integrated test systems.
The digitisers are designed for the 3U PXI Express platform. They can stream at rates as fast as 700 MB/s and synchronise channels on multiple modules to within 160ps resolution.
These capabilities make the digitisers ideal for 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.