ADLINK LPCIe-3488A - Manual (Page 11)

Introduction 1
LPCIe/LPCI/USB-3488A
1 Introduction
1.1 Overview
ADLINK’s LPCIe/LPCI/USB-3488A GPIB controller interface cards
are fully compatible with the IEEE488.2 instrumentation control
and communication standard and are capable of controlling up to
14 stand-alone instruments via IEEE488 cables. The
LPCIe/LPCI/USB-3488A are designed to meet the requirements
for high performance and maximum programming portability. They
were developed using ADLINK’s intellectual property in FPGAs
which incorporates the GPIB controller, provides reliable GPIB
bus control capability, and supports a transfer rate up to 1.5 MB/s.
With APIs that are compatible with National Instruments
1
software
and VISA support, the LPCIe/LPCI/USB-3488A offer the best
compatibility with your existing applications and instrument driv-
ers.
Performance
ADLINK takes advantage of our proven expertise in PCI/PCIe
interface cards when developing these GPIB interface cards. The
LPCIe/LPCI-3488A, in the low-profile PCI form factor, can adapt to
most industrial and desktop computers. A 2 KB FIFO between the
GPIB bus and PCI controller buffers GPIB read/write operations,
eliminating the gap between the slow GPIB bus (approx. 1.5 MB/s)
and the fast PCI bus (132 MB/s), dramatically increasing overall
system performance. The ADLINK USB-3488A is further equipped
with 32 KB FIFO to the read/write operations, for maximum trans-
fer rates exceeding 1.2 MB/s.
1. National Instruments is a registered trademark of National
Instruments Corporation