PCI Express and USB 2.0 IMPROVE PERFORMANCE OF PC-based measurements

摘要

ADVANCES IN PC AND SILICON TECHNOLOGIES ALLOW LOW-COST, PC-BASED PLUG-IN DEVICES TO ACCURATELY AND QUICKLY PERFORM MEASUREMENTS AND CONTROL. As PC technology has evolved, the ability to use standard desktop and portable computers for sophisticated test, control, and design applications has improved dramatically. Economies of scale have made it more cost-effective to use the gigahertz-speed processing and gigabytes of memory on standard computers than for vendors to install processors and memory in measurement instruments. Meanwhile, test-and-control vendors have repurposed commercially available silicon technologies. For example, ADCs and DACs for electronic devices, such as cellular phones and DVD players, now also provide speed and accuracy for PC-based data-acquisition devices. These high-production commercial components are available at fractions of the cost and in much faster design cycles than it would take for instrumentation vendors to design their own components. With these advances in PC and silicon technologies, low-cost, PC-based plug-in devices can now perform measurements and control with accuracy and processing speed that traditional instruments lack.