Signatec has released the EC14150 wideband signal acquisition card for commercial laptop computers.
The compact, low-power form factor offers 150 MHz sampling rate on two channels, 14-bit resolution and 512MB onboard RAM, yet consumes only 4.5W.
This is said to make it ideal for mobile data acquisition applications.
Signatec's EC1450 is a 54mm-compliant Expresscard board equipped with standard 'plug-and-play' features common in PCI systems.
The entire 512MB memory may be used as a large FIFO for acquiring data directly to the Expresscard bus continuously - referred to as continuous record mode - or in data transfer mode, block acquisitions to RAM and transfers to PC modes.
In either continuous record mode or data transfer mode, Signatec's EC14150 is capable of sustaining 180 MB/s transfers over the Expresscard PCI Express (PCIe) x1 data link bus interface.
Test data show recordings with the EC14150's large 512 MB FIFO buffering the recording process can be sustained continuously at up to 90 MSPS, even when operating in traditional non real-time environments such as the Windows operating system.
The EC14150 was designed to maximise the quality of the captured signal in terms of signal-to-noise ratio and spurious-free dynamic range over a wide frequency range.
A 24dB amplifier/attenuator circuit is at the input of both analogue channels, where 20dB of amplification and 4dB of attenuation are available for selection in steps of 1dB giving the EC14150 voltage ranges from 100mVp-p to 3Vp-p.
Both input channels implement a transformer coupled input for best possible signal performance.
The EC14150 bandwidth ranges from 200KHz to 200MHz, and can be set to trigger from the input data channels, the external trigger signal input or via software command and supports single-shot, segmented, and pre-trigger triggering modes.
A frequency synthesised clock allows the ADC sampling rate to be set to virtually any clock value up to 150MHz, offering maximum flexibility for sampling rate selection.
This frequency selection flexibility comes at no cost to the acquisition clock quality/performance when locked to either the onboard 10 MHz, 5PPM reference clock or to an externally provided 10MHz reference clock via the onboard clock input connector.
This same sync clock input connector can also be used for applying an external clock to the EC14150's onboard ADCs.
Signatec's EC14150 comes with the following: Windows 2000/XP/Vista drivers; C Function Library with source code; turnkey signal recording software application; software manual that describes how to use the available library of functions or API to create larger applications or systems.
