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Spectrum announces the availability of complete new designed LabVIEW drivers for the range of fast PCI/PCI-X card of the M2i series. This fourth generation of PC instruments contains digitizers starting with 16 channels, 16 bit resolution and 100 kS/s sampling rate up to versions with 12 bit resolution and 200 MS/s, arbitrary waveform generators (AWG) with up to 125 MS/s and digital I/O cards with up to 125 MS/s. The memory of these cards can be upgraded up to 4 Gbyte.

The LabVIEW drivers base on the standard Windows drivers of Spectrum and consist of a set of LabVIEW libraries and a special DLL for easy and fast data handling. For a fast start of application development a wide range of examples is delivered with the driver each showing different modes of the cards. All examples as well as the LabVIEW libraries are free to edit and can therefore be adjusted and enhanced following each ones special demands. The drivers are also prepared for hardware or feature enhancements: The complete Spectrum API is directly supported without any limits. This allows to use all card features under LabVIEW with no compromise. All LabVIEW library functions as well as the internal card driver functions are equipped with a comfortable error routing function allowing to see any programming or sequence error as a detailed text message. Due to the powerful examples it is no problem to program different standard applications within minutes.

The examples cover per examples a soft scope, long term data acquisition, online signal generator as well as the addressing of the complete up to 4 GByte on-board memory. The special data handling DLL that is delivered with the LabVIEW driver makes access to data very easy. Data can be read out as raw data, sorted and normalized as 16 bit integer or even completely recalculated to voltage values. The LabVIEW driver is optimized for high data bandwidth and is able to receive a maximum transfer speed between card on-board memory and PC memory of up to 200 MB/s (raw data). The Spectrum M2i cards can be used with all LabVIEW versions starting with version 6.1.