New 4-channel, 14-bit, 125 MS/s waveform digitizer streams data across PCI Express bus in real time

Montreal, Canada (January 4, 2011) AlazarTech, a manufacturer of high performance, low cost PC Based Instruments, today announced the release of ATS9440, a 4-channel, 14-bit, 125 MS/s waveform digitizer based on the 8-lane PCI Express bus.

One of the major differentiating features of the ATS9440 is its ability to stream the captured data from all four input channels to the host computer’s memory or hard disk in real time, thus enabling high channel count biomedical imaging applications that were previously not possible.

In fact, the 8-lane PCI Express bus interface on the ATS9440 is capable of sustained data transfers as fast as 1.6 GB/s, which is about 16 times faster than legacy PCI bus and 8 times faster than USB 3.0.

Up to four (4) ATS9440 cards can be configured as a Master/Slave system capable of acquiring as many as 16 simultaneous inputs and streaming all of them to computer memory or hard disk. This is thanks to the fact that PCI Express is a point-to-point bus, so each slot can have its own full bus throughput, as opposed to legacy PCI bus which was a shared bus and adding multiple cards in a system used to mean that each card could only get a portion of the bus throughput.

“We noticed that many of our customers were using two of our 2-channel A/D cards to acquire data from sensors that had at least 4 outputs”, stated Muneeb Khalid, President of AlazarTech. “We accepted the challenge of providing these customers with a robust and high performance solution, resulting in the introduction of ATS9440”.

ATS9440 offers four simultaneous analog inputs that can each be sampled at rates up to 125 MS/s with 14 bit vertical resolution, providing Signal to Noise Ratio in excess of 65 dB. Each channel can have up to 2 Gigasamples of on-board, dual port acquisition memory buffer when used in single channel mode. When used in dual or quad channel mode, this memory is divided equally between the channels.

The unit occupies only one half-length PCI Express x8 or x16 slot.

Applications for ATS9440 are:

• OCT and other bio-medical imaging applications that require high dynamic range, external clocking and fast, sustained throughput to computer memory for real-time signal processing

• Other scanning applications that involve Acquisition of data with a rapidly occurring trigger (radar, ultrasonics, spectrometry, tomography …)

• Acquisition of data with a randomly occurring trigger (lightning test, acoustic emissions, …)

• RF signal recording applications that require continuous streaming of data across the bus

OEMs can integrate the ATS9440 PCI Express digitizers into their own systems very easily using the Windows 7/Vista/XP compatible ATS-SDK Software Development Kit. This SDK includes sample programs written in C/C++, Visual BASIC and MATLAB.

A high performance LabVIEW® VI, called ATS-VI, is also available.

A source code Linux driver, ATS-Linux, can also be made available to qualified customers, who will have to execute a Non-Disclosure Agreement .

For Further Technical or Editorial Information
For further technical or editorial information, contact Muneeb Khalid at
1-877-7-ALAZAR or +1-514-426-4899 or via e-mail at muneeb@alazartech.com. Mailing address is AlazarTech, 6600 Trans-Canada Highway, Suite 310, Pointe-Claire, QC, Canada H9R 4S2. Company web site is www.alazartech.com.