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.

As with other NI M Series DAQ devices, the new NI PCIe-6251 and NI PCIe-6259 DAQ devices feature the NI-STC 2 system controller, the NI-PGIA 2 amplifier and NI-MCal calibration technology.

The new PCI Express 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.