Glossary
MXI-Express Series User Manual 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.
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 Express A scalable full-simplex serial bus standard that operates at 2.5 Gbps and
offers both asynchronous and isochronous data transfers.
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.
PXI PCI eXtensions for Instrumentation. PXI is an open specification
thatbuilds off the CompactPCI specification by adding
instrumentation-specific features.