National Instruments today released a PC-based multifunction data acquisition (DAQ) devices for PCI Express. The NI PCIe-6251 and NI PCIe-6259 DAQ devices feature up to 32 analog channels with 16 bit, 1.25 MS/s sampling speed and 10 MHz digital I/O on up to 32 lines.

PCI Express is a high-performance, point-to-point serial interconnect with a scalable architecture that provides bandwidth from two to 30 times that of traditional PCI. The NI PCIe-6251 and NI PCIe-6259 devices use a x1("by one") PCI Express connector that provides 250 MB/s bandwidth per device.

The PCIe-6251 and NI PCIe-6259 devices feature the NI-STC 2 system controller, the NI-PGIA 2 amplifier and NI-MCal calibration technology. The devices are part of the M Series family, offering up to 32 analog input channels with 16-bit, 1.25 MS/s sampling speed; up to four analog output channels with 16-bit, 2.8 MS/s sampling speed and 32 high-speed digital I/O (DIO) channels with 10 MHz sampling speed. The devices also include additional static DIO lines and two 32-bit counter/timers.

M Series multifunction data acquisition devices include NI measurement services software, including NI-DAQmx driver software and VI Logger Lite data-logging software. In addition, all examples and applications originally written for PCI-based M Series devices are fully compatible with their new PCI Express counterparts.