ADLINK LPCI-3488A - Manual (Page 9)

Introduction 1
1 Introduction
1.1 Overview
ADLINK’s LPCI-3488A and PXI-3488A GPIB controller interface
cards are fully compatible with the IEEE488.2 instrumentation con-
trol and communication standard and are capable of controlling up
to 14 stand-alone instruments via IEEE488 cables. The LPCI-
3488A and PXI-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 LPCI-3488A and PXI-3488A offer the best com-
patibility with your existing applications and instrument drivers.
1.1.1 Performance
ADLINK’s expertise in PCI and PXI interface cards was leveraged
when developing these newly designed GPIB interface card. The
LPCI-3488A, which is the low-profile PCI form factor, supports
both 3.3 V and 5 V PCI buses and can be adapted to most indus-
trial and desktop computers. The PXI-3488A is compliant with PXI
specification Rev. 2.0 and can be used with most PXI and Com-
pactPCI system. A 2 KB FIFO is placed between the GPIB bus
and PCI controller to buffer GPIB read/write operations. This FIFO
eliminates the gap between the slow GPIB bus (~1.5 MB/s) and
the fast PCI bus (132 MB/s), and dramatically increases overall
system performance.
1.1.2 Compatibility
ADLINK’s GPIB interface solutions are delivered with complete
software support, including a driver API set that is fully binary com-
patible with NI
2
’s GPIB-32.DLL. All programs written based on the
1. National Instruments is a registered trademark of National Instruments Cor-
poration
2. NI is a registered trademark of National Instruments Corporation