CIE Components in Electronics
Spectrum Instrumentation has used its modular design philosophy to create a unique solution for customers wanting multi-channel AWGs: Having 8 AWG channels on a single PCIe-card only 168 mm in length offers great new opportunities for very compact and affordable test systems. The addition of the two new 8-channel-cards to Spectrum’s latest “65” series of PCIe Arbitrary waveform generators means that, using Spectrum’s Star-Hub, up to 80 channels can be fully synchronized in a single PC! As standard, all cards of the “65” series offer a huge on-board memory of 512 MSamples to store and replay lots of waveforms. Using the PCIe-x4 platform, these AWGs provide a data transfer speed which is 5 to 10 times higher than in other solutions, offering 700 MByte/s of FIFO streaming speed. This is ideal for automated testing when customers need to replay lots of different test signals over many channels to accurately recreate real world test conditions. Applications include component testing, automotive, robotics, aerospace, medical and industrial ultrasound, LIDAR, radar and sonar.
“This family of AWG cards has the lowest noise of any AWGs that we have so far designed, being more than 20% lower when compared to our predecessor AWG families” said Oliver Rovini, Spectrum’s CTO. “In addition, these cards now have 16-bit resolution and a clock being twenty times more accurate at only ±1 ppm. We already have a university research department using an AWG to control the placement of individual atoms.”
Offering up to 8 channels per card, the cost per channel is cut dramatically. This makes Spectrum’s high-performance test solutions really affordable and opens up new application areas that were restricted due to the high costs of multi-point, dedicated AWG solutions.
