Strategic Test has announced Windows Vista 64-bit and 32-bit drivers for its range of digitiser, AWG, fast digital I/O and digital pattern generator cards
The drivers are compatible with all of the 150 PCI, PXI and CompactPCI cards in the UltraFast series.
The Windows Vista drivers are supplied at no cost and can be downloaded by existing customers from the company website.
The same simple programming concept found in the other Windows and Linux drivers has been employed, allowing customers to upgrade their OS without modifying their application code.
There are two distinct advantages to 64-bit Windows over 32-bit.
64-bit Windows delivers higher computation performance, significantly benefiting users who perform real-time analysis of measurement data or signal processing.
64-bit Windows also supports up to 128GBytes of PC Ram as compared to 4GBytes of 32-bit Windows XP.
This allows the use of low-cost PC-memory instead of expensive on-board memory for applications requiring streaming of data to or from the PC.
This method also enables longer record or replay times, as the maximum amount of signal memory that can be added to the current range of digitiser or AWG cards from most vendors is 4GBytes.
For example, an application requiring a 200MByte/second acquisition rate using 32-bit Windows, the maximum measurement time would be 17.5 seconds.
On a PC configured with 128GBytes Ram running 64-bit Windows the measurement time would increase to over 6.5 minutes.
