All aboard the PCI Express

National Instruments has released what it claims are the industry’s first PC-based multifunction data acquisition (DAQ) devices for PCI Express.

The new NI PCIe-6251 and NI PCIe-6259 DAQ devices combine the PCI Express bus with National Instruments M Series DAQ to offer engineers and scientists fast analog and digital I/O with the dedicated per-slot bandwidth of PCI Express. The new devices feature up to 32 analog channels with 16 bit, 1.25 MS/sec 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 by one PCI Express connector that provides 250 MB/sec bandwidth per device. In addition, these and other PCI Express devices from NI are completely software-compatible with traditional PCI, helping both vendors and users preserve their investments in existing driver and application software.