PDA12-512K Virtek 125 MHz Waveform Digitizer

The DynamicSignals / Signatec PDA12 / PDA12A are PCI compatible boards which offers high resolution waveform capture at higher speeds than have previously been possible. With 12 bits of resolution and a signal bandwidth from DC to 50 MHz, the PDA12A is useful for a wide range of applications which require capturing signal information with a wide dynamic range at multi-megahertz frequencies. The PDA12A is available with 512k or 2M of 12 bit sample memory.

Two signal channels are implemented on the PDA12A allowing two signals to be sampled simultaneously at rates up to 62.5 megasamples per channel. The clocks can also be offset by 180 degrees so that the data from the two channels may be interleaved to obtain a single channel running at 125 megasamples per second. Each channel has either 256k or 1M 12 bit samples. The single channel mode allows the total amount of memory to be available on one channel, or to interleave the data from two converters to yield an effective sampling rate of twice the individual converters. The PDA12A is equipped with multiple acquisition and trigger modes. For single event acquisitions the PDA12A is equipped with a single shot mode allowing pretrigger, normal or delayed trigger storage. For multi-trigger acquisitions segmented or gated triggering is possible. The PDA12A is equipped with an on board counter providing trigger event time stamping in the segmented mode. Delayed and pretrigger features may also be used when acquiring segmented data.

Multiple PDA12A boards can be connected in a Master/ Slave configuration via a 20 conductor ribbon cable at the top of the board. This allows for data sampling to be synchronized between one Master and up to three Slave PDA12A boards. The PDA12A incorporates the Signatec Auxiliary Bus (SAB) with data transfer rates up to 250 megabytes per second to other peripherals for storage or processing. The SAB allows for high speed data transfers to large memory boards (such as MEM500) or fast processor boards (such as SP20 or PMP8).