PDA1000 Virtek 1 GHz Waveform Digitizer

The DynamicSignals / Signatec PDA1000 1 GHz Waveform Digitizer is the state of the art in ultra high-speed waveform capturing systems. It features an analog bandwidth of DC to 500 MHz and digitization rates of up to 1 GHz. It employs an extraordinary memory depth of 256 megasamples for capturing extremely long events. The entire memory may be used as a giant FIFO for acquiring data directly to either the SAB or PCI bus.

The PDA1000 is a 64-bit PCI compatible board equipped with standard 'Plug and Play' features common in PCI systems. It is capable of Bus Master DMA data transfers at a sustained rate of 250 megabytes/second. It can also operate in 32-bit PCI slots in which case the transfer rate will be limited to about 120 megabytes per second.

The PDA1000 incorporates the advanced DynamicSignals / Signatec Auxiliary Bus (SAB) that allows for data transfers of up to 500 megabytes/second. This allows for the high-speed transfer of data to fast processor boards, such as DynamicSignals / Signatec's PMP8A, or other peripherals. The SAB also incorporates device control features for operating the PDA1000 independent of the host bus.

The PDA1000 is equipped with an interconnect port to allow multiple boards to be interconnected in a Master/Slave configuration. Up to three Slave boards may be operated with one Master. Master/Slave connections are via a ribbon cable that connects at the top of the board. In this configuration the clock and trigger signals from the Master drive the Slave boards so that data sampling on all boards occurs simultaneously.

The PDA1000 has six software selectable signal amplitude ranges from a maximum of 3.2 volts down to 200 millivolts full scale. Extreme care was taken in the design of the front-end analog circuitry to minimize noise and distortion.

External clock and trigger signals are provided via SMA connectors on the back bracket. Also provided is a user selectable digital output signal for synchronization purposes. Effectively, eleven internal clock frequencies may be selected from 1.0 GHz down to 977 kHz in factors of 2.

The PDA1000 supports single shot, segmented, and pretrigger triggering modes with delayed triggering or pretrigger samples.