Montreal, Canada ( November 24, 2000) - Gage Applied Technologies , a wholly owned subsidiary of Tektronix, Inc. [NYSE:TEK], and leading manufacturer of card modular instruments, introduces the CompuScope 14100 , a single-slot A/D and Scope card for the PCI bus featuring 14 bit vertical resolution, capable of 100 MS/s digitization rate.

CompuScope 14100 is the fastest 14 bit waveform digitizer available on the market in any form factor, be it card modular of stand-alone, thus enabling measurements that were previously not possible.

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The CompuScope 14100 is a state-of-the-art, single-slot, PCI bus card capable of performing 14 bit analog to digital conversion at blazing sample rates up to 100 MS/s (Million Samples Per Second) in one-channel mode and 50 MS/s in dual channel simultaneous mode.

The CompuScope 14100 features an impressive 50 MHz analog bandwidth with over 70 dB dynamic range (SFDR) and 63dB Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR). This unprecedented dynamic range at this sampling speed makes CompuScope 14100 truly unique amongst waveform digitizers.

With up to 1 Billion samples of on-board memory, CompuScope 14100 features the deepest acquisition memory buffers on the market, allowing very long data recording sessions for applications such as DSL testing, wireless signals, antenna research etc.

The major challenge in the design of CompuScope 14100 was to ensure signal integrity in a relatively high noise environment inside a PC.

Signal fidelity problems were divided into two categories: Noise from power supply and electromagnetic interference (EMI); and Distortion from input amplifier.

Noise was controlled by means similar to the ones used on the company's 12 bit digitizer products, except a special power supply filtering circuit was designed to increase the Power Supply Rejection Ratio to handle the extra two bits of resolution.

Distortion caused a great deal more headaches for the designers. Off-the-shelf variable gain amplifiers either did not provide enough bandwidth, or had too high noise spectral density or injected too high a distortion into the signal. A proprietary (patent pending), mixed mode, digitally programmable variable gain circuit was designed to accommodate the seemingly contradictory requirements of low noise, low distortion, high dynamic range and high bandwidth.

The CompuScope 14100 takes full advantage of the fast data throughput offered by the PCI bus. Using Bus Mastering, data can be transferred from on-board memory to the PC's memory at rates up to 100 MB/s - more than 100 times faster than ISA and VXI bus and more than 1000 times faster than GPIB!

Full Scatter-Gather support in Windows drivers allows this high throughput to be realized even when the CompuScope 14100 is being used in a Windows application.

This fast data throughput allows CompuScope 14100 to be used in test and measurement applications which were previously not possible. For example, RADAR, ultrasonic or imaging applications that require trigger repeat frequencies in excess of 10 KHz can now be fulfilled with the CompuScope 14100.

The CompuScope 14100 is fully supported by the powerful GageScope for Windows software for which enables users to operate the card like an oscilloscope without writing a single line of programming code. It allows users to view, manipulate, store, analyze and print data and to convert it to an ASCII format for use in spreadsheets and mathematical software packages.

Combined with GageScope, CompuScope 14100 can act as a Digital Oscilloscope , a wide dynamic range FFT Analyzer , a Transient Recorder with time and date stamp capabilities or a Waveform Analyzer . The SuperRes feature of GageScope for Windows also allows the effective resolution of CompuScope 14100 to be extended well beyond 24 bits at slower sample rates.

The CompuScope 14100 has several key advantages over traditional multi-MegaHertz data acquisition using Digital Storage Oscilloscopes and Transient Recorders under GPIB or IEEE 488 control, as the table below demonstrates::

	CompuScope 14100		Traditional DSOs
	14 Bit vertical resolution		Mostly only 8 bit resolution
	More than 64 times the resolution of 8 bit scopes More than 4 times the resolution of 12 bit digitizers		Some slower speed recorders are available with 12 bit resolution
	Up to 1 Billion samples of acquisition memory		Deepest scope memory is 64 Meg - 16 times shorter!
	Up to 16 channel simultaneous A/D conversion		Up to 4 channels maximum for DSOs
	100 MB/s transfer rate to PC memory		Few hundred KB/s using GPIB
	Easy to program, thanks to Gage's SDKs for popular platforms such as C/C++, MATLAB and LabVIEW		Difficult to program; third-party application software usually needed
	Installed inside PC Chassis		Comes in external box

Typical applications of the CompuScope 14100 include

• DSL Testing
• Wireless Signal Recording
• Ultrasound
• Imaging
• RADAR
• LIDAR
• Shock Wave Testing
• Disk Drive Testing
• RF Receivers
• CCD Testing

Software Development Kits (SDKs) are available for C/C++, MATLAB and LabVIEW, with support for Windows 95/98, Windows NT and Windows 2000.

A Linux driver and sample program is also available.

Contact Gage for pricing information.

For further information, contact Nicole Faubert at +1-514-633-7007, extension 3034, or via e-mail at: marketing @ gage-applied.

For more information about Gage Applied Technologies, Inc. click here .