All data acquisition and waveform generators of the M2i series from Spectrum Systementwicklung are now delivered with Linux drivers suitable for Linux distributions with kernel 2.4 and kernel 2.6. These drivers support single processor systems as well as SMP systems. Offering these new drivers Spectrum, the expert for fast and robust synchronous PC instruments, continues its extended software support for PC instruments. With this driver multi channel A/D cards and digitizers ranging from 100 kS/s up to 500 MS/s with resolution from 8 bit to 16 bit, D/A cards with 8 or 14 bit resolution up to 125 MS/s as well as fast digital I/O cards with up to 64 channels are available under state-of-the-art Linux systems like Suse 10.2 or Fedora Core 6. All card features like the up to 4 GByte on-board memory or the sustained transfer rate of up to 225 MB/s into the PC memory are supported. Using the Star-Hub option it is possible to even set up synchronous systems of up to 1000 channels.

The drivers are available for Linux 32 bit as well as 64 bit version. This offers processing power for complex calculation tasks as well as several GByte of PC memory for acquired or generated data. The complete PC memory can be addressed directly from the card using Scatter-Gather DMA allowing extremely long data acquisitions even with high sampling rates. Spectrum offers freely available pre-compiled kernel modules for common Linux distributions like Suse, Redhat, Fedora or Debian. Customers may also get the complete kernel driver source code against a signed NDA allowing to compile the driver for nearly any Linux distribution that's on the market. Linux support also includes a wide variety of GNU C++ examples.