Evaluation Engineering - 26

DATA ACQUISITION

Sponsored by

the 70-mV range," adding that the thermocouple datalogger comes with Picolog
6 software.
"Newark's broad product portfolio and
holistic support services ensure engineers
at every level are supported, whether that
be to set up simple or advanced acquisitions, or to record, view and analyze
data, products such as the TC-08 ensure
engineers can do so quickly and easily,"
Lipps said.

To 5 GB/s and beyond
According to Oliver Rovini, CTO of
Spectrum Instrumentation, the company offers 130 different DAQ products
with speeds ranging from 1 kS/s to 5
GS/s. "They are available as PCIe and PXIe
cards with one to eight channels on a
single card or one to 128 channels in
a PC-system," he said. "For customers
wanting a fast setup and a mobile solution, we offer stand-alone units with LXI/
Ethernet connection to any PC, laptop,

Spectrum Instrumentation SBench 6 software for
data collection, storage, analysis, and reporting.

or LAN. They cover the same wide speed
range with two to 48 channels per box."
In addition, he said the company offers a
five-year warranty plus support directly
from the company's design engineers.
Rovini also said the company offers
easy-to-use and out-of-the-box SBench
6 software for data collection, storage,
analysis, and reporting. "The software
is designed by Spectrum and focuses
on our own product range
and supports all hardware
features," he said. "Key benefits are the fast start with
first measurement results
within minutes and the
possibility to do high-speed

26

EVALUATION ENGINEERING MAY/JUNE 2020

Pentek Quartz
Model 5990 3U
OpenVPX board.

data streaming with a speed
of several GB/s."
Pentek offers ADC and
DAC open-architecture COTS
FPGA board-level products for VPX, PCIe,
XMC, cPCI, and AMC, with sampling
rates ranging from 200 MS/s to 6.4 GS/s
with resolutions of 12 to 16 bits, according
to Rodger Hosking, vice president and cofounder. "They are highly programmable
across wide operating limits using software board support packages and drivers
for Windows and Linux," he said. "We also
provide graphically oriented FPGA development tools with source code and development libraries for custom applications."
Pentek also offers its Navigator development tools for software and FPGA
development, including acquisition and
waveform generation engines for triggered operation suitable for radar range
gates and beamforming. "We include
hardware and FPGA-based decimation and interpolation filters to cover
bandwidths from a few kHz to 2.5 GHz,"
he said. "Our Navigator Signal Viewer

Per Vices Cyan platform
rear view showing QSFP+ ports

displays time and frequency display of
live signals acquired during runtime to
speed development of new applications."
"Per Vices offers the highest bandwidth
DAQ products available," said Brandon
Malatest, COO. "Our Cyan platform is
the latest and highest performance COTS
platform available with up to 16 GHz of
instantaneous RF bandwidth and 4x40Gb/s QSFP+ ports for data transfer to host
systems."
Malatest said the company's focus is
on two parts: data acquisition and data
processing. With respect to the former, he
said, "Our platforms are very high-performance and application-agnostic, which
allow them to meet the needs of many
markets. These systems are designed for
flexibility for the customer to use as needed." As for data processing, he said, "Cyan
has a Stratix 10 FPGA SoC on board which
enables customers to take advantage of
very high DSP capabilities on the same
platform as the raw data acquisition.
These DSP capabilities are either offered
to the customer to implement their own
solution, or we can use and modify our
existing IP to offer a complete solution."

Targeting niches for
DAQ technology
While many DAQ providers address a variety of industries and signal types, others
focus on a specific niche. TotalTemp, for
example, applies data-acquisition technology to the thermal test of devices such
as power semiconductors.1 "TotalTemp
uses the award-winning Synergy Nano
temperature controller, which not only
can log thermal and process information,
but includes logging of external analog
and digital signals as well as alarms that
can stop testing or notify the test operator of events via text or email," said John
Booher, CTO. The low-cost logging capability built into the controller, he said,
supports automated cloud storage for
data protection, on-screen logging, and
the ability to automatically print results
to a PDF file or network printer. It also
facilitates the export of results to Excel.
"Lawson Labs has been making highresolution data-acquisition systems since
1981," said Thomas Lawson, founder
and president. "Distinguishing features
http://www.bkprecision.com
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