Spectrum introduces the M3i.3240, a fast monolithic 12 bit A/D converter. Using only one ADC per channel with no interleaving – this guarantees best signal quality. Compared to 8 bit digitizers this card has 16 times higher resolution and an outstanding SNR of 63 dB at +-1 V range. The complete series consists of 4 different versions ranging from 250 MS/s to 500 MS/s with one or two synchronous channels available as PCI/PCI-X and PCI Express version. The M3i.32xx series is suitable for a large range of application areas especially high energy physics, research and development, radar, spectroscopy and laser applications.

The configurable A/D amplifier stage consists of a 50 ohm terminated path with a bandwidth of 250 MHz and a second, high impedance path with a bandwidth > 125 MHz. 6 input ranges between +-200 mV and +-10 V can be software selected. In addition each channel has a programmable AC/DC coupling and a selectable low pass filter to optimise noise figures. The card comes as a standard with 128 MSample and can be equipped with up to 2 GSample of on-board memory to cope with the large amounts of data. Using the full memory option it is possible to acquire more than 4 seconds of data with 500 MS/s.

The M3i.32xx is delivered with Windows 2000/XP/XP64/Vista/Vista64 and Linux 32/64 bit drivers and is already tested with Windows 7. Delivery also includes a set of programming examples and a basic version of the new SBench 6 software which has been optimized for handling GBytes of acquired data. The driver supports all M3i cards as well as all M2i cards allowing to easy upgrade hardware for existing applications.

A set of standard programming examples is provided to illustrate the boards main signal capture functions. Extensive support includes Visual C++, Borland C++, Gnu C++, Visual Basic, VB.NET, C#, J# and Delphi code. As an alternative drivers for LabVIEW, MATLAB and Agilent VEE are available.