NI, Tektronix develop industry's fastest PXI digitizer

AUSTIN, USA: National Instruments announced the joint development of a high-speed digitizer with Tektronix, a leading provider of test, measurement and monitoring instrumentation.

The PXI Express digitizer sets a new milestone for PXI modular instrumentation performance, with greater than 3 GHz bandwidth, sample rates beyond 10 GS/s, data throughput of more than 600 MB/s and multi-module synchronization capabilities.

Because of this collaborative development effort, engineers and scientists will experience a new level of measurement performance and test productivity in demanding high-speed applications such as those found in physics and experimental research, aerospace and defense, communications, semiconductor and consumer electronics industries.

"National Instruments is excited to work with Tektronix and bring their core signal acquisition technology to the PXI platform," said Dr. James Truchard, president, CEO and cofounder of National Instruments. "We have worked for many years to deliver productivity improvements to engineers in automated test through LabVIEW and PXI, and this new module represents the highest performance acquisition capability that we've delivered in this platform to date."

While National Instruments and Tektronix have collaborated on various projects for more than 20 years, the digitizer represents the first joint hardware development project between the two companies and takes advantage of the strengths of both companies to deliver advanced performance for demanding applications.

Proprietary Tektronix ASICs and design expertise provide the basis for high-speed signal acquisition with low noise and high linearity, delivering superior signal integrity.

The National Instruments leadership in graphical system design software, proprietary Synchronization and Memory Core (SMC) technology and expertise in PC-based instrumentation offer high data throughput for faster test execution and precision multi-module timing and synchronization capability for building high-channel-count and integrated test systems.

"Tektronix co-innovation with National Instruments on this performance-leading digitizer is yet another example of our continued technology leadership and commitment to innovation," said Amir Aghdaei, president of Tektronix. "As the industry leader, we remain focused on delivering solutions that address the critical test and measurement needs of our customers."

As part of the NI PXI platform, the new digitizer joins a family of products designed for high measurement throughput using high-bandwidth and low-latency PCI and PCI Express bus technologies.

Engineers and scientists can integrate NI digitizers into test systems comprising any of the more than 1,500 instruments available for the PXI platform, ranging from precision DC to RF.

The new digitizer will integrate with other PXI instruments and NI LabVIEW industry-standard software for instrument control and automation, NI LabWindows/CVI ANSI C software development environment and Microsoft Visual Studio .NET development tools to offer a range of programming options.

The official product release and first shipments of the new digitizer will be available from National Instruments in 2010, with lead user engagements continuing through the end of 2009.