2 of 54 PCI Express cards Typical Motherboard with PCI and PCI Express Slots (please click for enlarged view)

As the first manufacturer Spectrum Systementwicklung is offering its range of digitizers and data acquisition cards as a PCI Express version. Starting mid of 2007 54 different A/D products with a resolution ranging from 8 bit to 16 bit are available as PCI Express x1. State-of-the-art motherboards nowadays are already based on PCI Express. Currently most motherboards have PCI as well as PCI Express slots. It is expected that within a very few years legacy PCI slots as well as PCI-X slots are only to be found in special industrial PCs or a very few expensive server systems.

The PCI Express cards from Spectrum are 100% software compatible to the M2i card series for the PCI/PCI-X bus released just 2 years ago. As the PCI/PCI-X and the PCI Express version of the M2i series only differ in the bus interface the complete analog section as well as the control unit are identical. This even makes it possible to synchronise existing PCI/PCI-X cards with the new PCI Express version. The user has the free choice of the bus system. The range of cards available on PCI Express base per example includes a 16 channel 16 bit A/D card with 500 kS/s, an 8 channel 12 bit A/D card with 25 MS/s as well as a 2/4 channel 8 bit digitizer with 200/100 MS/s.

The PCI Express digitizers are equipped with a standard of 64 MByte on-board memory which can be extended to a maximum of 4 GByte. A special advantage of the PCI Express interface is the fact that the transfer rate is nearly independent of the number of used cards. As each slot is connected by a point-to-point lane the full bandwidth is available. The 2.5 GHz of the used x1 connector allow a maximum transfer rate in burst mode of 250 MB/s.

Alongside individual and combinable trigger, the possibility to synchronise several cards even throughout different systems, the cards give the benefits of big on-board memory, fast interface and rich software support. Drivers for Windows and Linux (32 bit and 64 bit version) as well as examples for all established programming languages are provided. The versatile interface possibilities to third-party products include LabVIEW, LabWindows, MATLAB, VEE, DASYLab or MS Excel.