National Instruments PCI-8331 User Manual
Page 40
Glossary
G-2
ni.com
D
device
a plug-in instrument card or pad that can contain multiple channels and
conversion devices. Plug-in boards and PCMCIA cards, which connect to
your computer parallel port, are examples of devices.
digital trigger
a TTL level signal having two discrete levels—a high and a low level
DMA
direct memory access—a method by which data can be transferred to/from
computer memory from/to a device or memory on the bus while the
processor does something else. DMA is the fastest method of transferring
data to/from computer memory.
dyad
MXI-4 dyad refers to any of the following 4 pairs of MXI-4 cards:
•
PCI-8331 and PXI-8331
•
PCI-8336 and PXI-8336
•
PXI-8331 and PXI-8331
•
PXI-8336 and PXI-8336
F
FPGA
Field Programmable Gate Array—a logic device that has its functionality
defined after it is manufactured.
I
IEEE
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
P
PCI
Peripheral Component Interconnect—a high-performance expansion bus
architecture originally developed by Intel to replace ISA and EISA. It is
achieving widespread acceptance as a standard for PCs and workstations;
it offers a theoretical maximum transfer rate of 132 Mbytes/s.
PCI-PCI bridge
a device that transparently expands the PCI bus on a computer motherboard
to another bus segment in the same machine. The bridge expands the
number of PCI expansion slots, but remains transparent to the end user.