The PDA16 is a dual channel waveform capture board that provides a remarkable combination of high speed and high resolution sampling along with a very large memory capacity. Signal frequencies up to 700 MHz can be accurately captured either in baseband or in higher order Nyquist zones using under-sampling techniques.

The PDA16 is a PCI/PCI-X 64-bit compatible board equipped with standard 'Plug and Play' features common in PCI systems. The entire 512 MB memory may be used as an exceptionally large FIFO for acquiring data directly to either the SAB or PCI bus continuously non stop. In either Buffered Acquisition Mode (where the 512 RAM FIFO is used) or Data Transfer Mode it is capable of sustaining 500 megabyte/sec transfers over the SAB and 640 megabyte/sec transfers over the PCI-X bus. Significant test data has shown that recordings with this large FIFO buffering the recording process can be continuous at the card's full sampling rate even when operating in traditional non real-time environments such as the Windows operating system.

The Signatec Auxiliary Bus (SAB) allows for the high-speed transfer of data to fast processor boards, such as Signatec's PMP1000, or other peripherals, independent of the host PCI-X bus. In addition to facilitating data transfers, the SAB can be used for operational control as well.

The PDA16 was designed to maximize the quality of the captured signal in terms of signal-to-noise ratio and spurious-free dynamic range over a very wide frequency range. Six voltage ranges are implemented with full scale input levels from 267 mV to 2.5 volts with two of these ranges implementing a transformer coupled input direct to the ADC for best possible signal performance (2.5 V and 1.67 V).

A frequency synthesized clock allows the ADC sampling rate to be set to virtually any clock value up to 160 MHz, offering maximum flexibility for sampling rate selection. This frequency selection flexibility comes at no cost to the acquisition clock quality/performance when locked to either the onboard 10 MHz, 5 PPM reference clock or to an externally provided 10 MHz reference clock. The ADC may also be clocked from an external clock source.

Up to four PDA16 boards may be interconnected in a Master/Slave configuration 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 PDA16 supports single shot, segmented, and pretrigger triggering modes.

Signatec's PDA16 enables users to add customized signal processing into the output data flow via Xilinx® Virtex FPGAs with embedded PowerPC processors. Standard development environments can be used to program for this device, such as Xilinx ISETM and System Generator with MATLAB software tools. To accommodate its customers' varied performance requirements, Signatec designed the PDA16 to utilize the Virtex-4 FX20 (standard) or FX60 device, delivering a processing performance range from 19,224 logic cells/1,224 kbits block RAM/32 DSP slices/1 Power PC to 56,880 logic cells/4,176 kbits block RAM/128 DSP slices/2 Power PCs, respectively. Processed data results can be sent to the PC or across the PDA16 SAB bus to other system devices, such as Signatec's parallel processing DSP board: PMP1000.