National Instruments AT E Series C

©NationalInstruments Corporation C-1 ATE Series User Manual

This appendix contains a list of commonly asked questions and their

answersr elating to usage and special features of the ATE Series device.

Whatare the AT E Series devices?

The ATE Series devices are switchless and jumperless, enhanced MIO

devicesthat use the DAQ-STC for timing.

Whati s the DAQ-STC?

TheDAQ-STC is the newsystem timing cont rol ASIC (application-specific

integratedcircuit) designed by NI and is the backbone of the AT E Series

devices.The DAQ-STC contains seven 24-bit counters and three 16-bit

counters. The counters are divided into three groups:

•Analog input—two 24-bit, two 16-bit counters

•Analog output—three 24-bit, one 16-bit counters

•General-purpose counter/timer functions—two 24-bit counters

The groups can be configuredin dependently with timing resolutions of

50 ns or 10 µs.With the DAQ-STC, you can interconnect a wide variety of

internaltiming signals to other internal blocks. The interconnection scheme

is quite flexible and completely software configurable. New capabilities

such asbuffered pulse generation, equivalent time sampling, and

seamlessly changing the sampling rate are possible.

Howfast is each ATE Series device?

Thelast numeral in the name of an AT E Series device specifies the settling

time in microseconds for that particular device. For example, the

AT-MIO-16E-2has a 2 µs settling time, which corresponds to a sampling

rate of 500 kS/s. These sampling rates are aggregate: one channel at

500 kS/s or twochan nels at 250 kS/s per channel illustrates the