Development of high-speed data acquisition card based on PXI Express Bus

This paper develops a high-speed data acquisition card based on PXI Express Bus, with 1.5GSa/s dual-channel sampling rate and 3GSa/s single-channel sampling rate, 8-bit of resolution, and 1GB of high-speed data cache. In the paper, an overall scheme of the system is presented, ADC08D1520 is utilized to realize the acquisition of dual channel/single channel signal, DDR2 SDRAM is used as the large-capacity data buffer, and PCI Express Endpoint Block is adopted to realize the protocol of the PCI Express Bus. The paper also proposes two data transmission schemes based on PCI Express Endpoint Block to improve the efficiency of data transmission. One is DMA engine, another is Peer-to-Peer Engine. The PXI Express driver which supports the DMA and interrupt is developed by NI-VISA. At last, the performance testing of the card is presented. The testing results show that this computer-based high-speed card offers an outstanding combination of high bandwidth (up to 800MHz) and dynamic range, which enables demanding measurements such as IF sampling of wide band signals.