National Instruments PXI-PCI 8330 Series

Glossary

PXI-PCI 8330 Series User Manual G-2 www.natinst.com

C Celsius

clock hardware component that controls timing for reading from or writing to

groups

counter/timer a circuit that counts external pulses or clock pulses (timing)

device a plug-in instrument card or pad that can contain multiple channels and

conversion devices. Plug-in boards and PCMCIA cards, which connects to

your computer parallel port, are examples of devices.

digital trigger a TTL level signal having two discrete levels—a high and a low le vel

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.

IEEE Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers

MITE MXI Interfaces To Everything—a custom ASIC designed by National

Instruments that implements the PCI bus interface. The MITE supports bus

mastering for high speed data transfers over the PCIbus.

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.