Analysis of NI GPIB Products' Excellent Features For more than two decades, there have been two major categories of bus dominated instrument control applications—the RS232 serial bus, commonly used to control scientific analytical instruments, and for controlling traditional test and measurement equipment. IEEE 488 General Purpose Interface Bus (GPIB).
Although all desktop and notebook computers in the world are equipped with RS232 interfaces, using GPIB interface to control instruments still requires special controller hardware. Unfortunately, many researchers and engineers often only consider the price factor when choosing to purchase instrument control hardware. They mistakenly believe that the GPIB interface card is just an ordinary commodity, and that it is the same for any controller that you choose. Does not matter.
This technical white paper will discuss the three main factors that determine the pros and cons of GPIB controllers. It will also detail some of the hardware and software features that can significantly increase the efficiency of your test and measurement system in all aspects, from more efficient application development to more High-speed, more stable and reliable application operation, and to ensure that the debug and maintenance are foolproof, will be discussed in the following content.
table of Contents:
· Three key factors · Operational performance · Reliability · Work efficiency · Summary
Three Key Factors When you purchase a GPIB controller for your instrument control system, remember that NI's GPIB controller offers you three unique advantages and attractive cost-effectiveness to ensure your Realize the most time-saving and cost-effective perfect solution for the entire system cycle.
High Performance - With unmatched hardware throughput and highly optimized driver software, you can conduct more tests in less time, resulting in a significant increase in overall efficiency while helping you achieve more product innovations , technological innovation, and then bring higher profits.
High reliability - The reliability of hardware and software guarantees your system to work continuously for a long time without any trouble and no longer needs to worry about an annoying and time-consuming fault interrupt. This high degree of reliability can reduce downtime and greatly save your time and cost.
High efficiency - configuration, troubleshooting, debugging tools, world-class technical support and 20 years of programming program interfaces (APIs) that have remained unchanged and in fact have become the industry standard, and the most extensive operating system support, such as feature achievements The most efficient and profitable development environment for ease of use. With these, you can ensure that the applications you need are created with the shortest time and effort, which further saves you valuable time and helps you to launch products faster.
In the following sections, we will focus on the three key aspects of GPIB controller hardware and analyze the obvious advantages of NI GPIB hardware and software features in these three areas. In addition, we compared with other non-NIGPIB hardware products to examine the benefits of NI solutions in both time and money savings.
Before further introduction, it should be noted that although these three aspects will be explored separately, it is impossible to completely separate them. For example, in order to increase the high reliability and power efficiency of the drive, the operating overhead within the system will increase, which will affect the performance of the system. The best combination of GPIB hardware and software is a good balance of features to provide the best performance, reliability and work efficiency. The ideal combination of GPIB software and hardware means a fine balance between the various conditions conducive to optimizing performance, reliability, and performance.
Performance When evaluating the overall performance of GPIB hardware, the most obvious specification is the data throughput of the board. For example, is the board's maximum data throughput 700 kB/s or 1.5 MB/s? However, in addition to the board speed, there are several other important factors that need to be carefully studied. These factors are concentrated in two aspects: 1) hardware speed, 2) drive speed.
The maximum data throughput rate of the hardware speed board is a very important technical indicator because it represents the fastest speed that the board can transmit data through the GPIB interface. The faster the transmission speed, the more data is transmitted in a shorter time. This is especially important in a product testing environment, because a few milliseconds of product testing time can save a lot of costs. It is also very important to examine the data transfer rate of GPIB boards in different transmission capacities. For example, is the performance of the block using smaller blocks and larger blocks to deliver data? Is the data throughput rate of the board consistent within the entire data transfer block size range? Figure 1 shows how NIPCI-GPIB can achieve performance for different sizes of data blocks.
The NIPCI-GPIB has a maximum transfer rate of more than 1.5MB/s, and its transmission rate is higher than 1MB/s when it uses a common transmission capacity of 500B. In addition, the board works well even if the transmitted data block is below 500B.
NI is relying on specially designed GPIB ASIC technology to improve product performance. NI hardware uses NI TNT GPIB ASIC chips. In addition to the specialized NAT4882 circuit to implement the IEEE 488.2 controller/call/listen function, NI TNTASIC also features the Turbo488 performance enhancement core and the required GPIB transceiver. In addition, NI TNTASIC also includes onboard FIFO and DMA transfer functions, it can not use CPU time, because the PC in the process of GPIB data transmission can still focus on performing other tasks.
In contrast, many low-cost GPIB vendors directly use the GPIBASIC of the cloned NEC PD7210 or TI TMS9914A. Although these ASICs are also relatively reliable, they do not have any features in NI TNTASIC that help improve performance, nor do they have on-board transceivers. Not only that, many low-cost boards do not provide DMA functionality and do not have on-board FIFOs, so hardware runs at a low speed.
NI TNT ASICs also have other features that complement their ability to improve performance. The NI TNT ASIC ensures full compliance/ compliance with the IEEE 488.1T1 latency criteria, ensuring that the instrument does not lose data and transfer data as efficiently as possible. In addition, NI TNTASIC's fast response to handshake signals is incredible. Finally, NI TNTASIC also has HS488, the high-speed handshake protocol defined by IEEE Standard 488.1-2003. The HS488 protocol defines a data throughput rate of 8MB/s. Users can use the HS488 protocol if they use the NI GPIB controller to connect HS488-enabled instruments. NI TNTASIC-enabled instruments can use HS488 in the firmware.
Compared with other PCI GPIB controller vendors, NI's PCI-GPIB hardware has obvious advantages in terms of performance. In addition to these standard features of NI calibration, the industry has also conducted a special test to load a device under test into a programmable electronic device and use an oscilloscope to read the response. These test instruments are controlled by a very simple software program. The program is very flexible and can send or receive data in small, large, and mixed chunks. By comparing the performance of NIGPIB hardware and low-cost GPIB boards, it can be seen that NI boards can increase performance by 5%-30%. The significance of this obvious advantage is quite remarkable. For example, with 10 hours as a shift, the test time for each device is 20 seconds. When the performance is improved by 5% to 30%, it means that 110 to 820 devices can be tested in the same time. Within five days of a week, the quantified effect of optimized performance is equivalent to an additional 570 to 4,120 devices.
Drive Speed ​​Although hardware speed is the most important factor in determining the overall performance of the entire GPIB board, the speed of the drive software is another key indicator that reflects the overall performance of the board. The design of the driver software architecture determines the efficiency of controlling various types of GPIB calls, including GPIB data transfer and GPIB bus management calls and error handling.
One of the important tasks of the driver is serial polling. The GPIB standard requires the controller to implement serial polling, which is to poll all devices on the GPIB bus and determine which device has requested service. The program must have dedicated processing time for serial polling to determine which device on the bus is requesting service. The NI-488.2 driver implements this function in a very efficient manner, and also provides an automatic polling mechanism, where the driver performs serial polling in the background and takes full advantage of program and processor idle times. Auto-polling not only makes more efficient use of PC resources, but it can also detect and respond to service requests much faster than other methods.
In addition to being able to poll, it is also important to drive synchronous and asynchronous data transfer functions. Through asynchronous data transfer, the instrument control program can help the PC processor make time for other tasks. For example, a program can have two synchronization cycles, one for GPIB transfers and the other for other analysis or user interface processing jobs.
Finally, since the NIGPIB driver API has become an accepted industry standard, the driver provided by a low-cost GPIB vendor generally responds to calls to the NI driver in a packaged manner. Because these driver developers do not understand the internal structure of NI drives and their complex principles, they cannot optimize their drivers. This reduces the performance of these packaged drives. In addition, it is difficult for the driver developer to provide a wrapper that can contain all the functions of the NI driver. This will result in some application development programs lacking some necessary functions.
Reliability The second important factor to consider when choosing a GPIB solution is reliability. It includes not only the reliability of the GPIB hardware, but also the reliability of the software and the credibility of the vendor.
Hardware reliability It is important to use a highly reliable hardware product because it represents a significant degree of system cost savings. If the hardware is very reliable and it works without any problems, you can save on the costs of downtime and hardware replacement and revalidation. NI has spared no effort to explore and only achieve the perfection of its GPIB hardware reliability. The features listed below help NI achieve this height:
· Custom ASIC - NI uses a customizable TNT ASIC, which is a crystal-clear and efficient design of GPIB development engineers' nearly 30 years of engineering experience - by using a specialized ASIC, NI has reduced its use in the design. The number of devices reduces the probability of failure. For example, the mean time between failure (MTBF) of a product is calculated based on the time of failure of each device that makes up the product. The fewer devices the product uses, the longer its MTBF.
· Environmental Specifications - Most NI GPIB hardware has the same accuracy and reliability in the 0 to 55°C range (individual products may vary). Many third-party GPIB boards operate in the 0 to 40°C range, and their functionality changes as they approach critical ranges.
· Industry specifications - NI GPIB hardware complies with the latest industry specifications, including IEEE488.1-2003 and the NI PCI-GPIB 2.1 PCI specification.
• Productivity – It is critical that your GPIB vendor has reliable manufacturing processes to ensure high-quality products. NI has been developing ice-producing GPIB products for more than 20 years. Optimized processes can increase product yields and ensure high-quality products. So NI's GPIB products have very low repair rates.
· Hardware Warranty - NIGPIB hardware has hardly any fault precedents, but it still offers a 2-year warranty. The purpose is to ensure that users do not have to bear any product maintenance costs even if they actually have problems with failure within two years. In addition, if some GPIB products are registered online, NI adds a one-year free warranty to these products. This 3-year warranty covers 95% of all available products.
Software reliability Reliable software support guarantees minimal downtime and develops and runs GPIB programs on a wider range of system platforms. The NI-488.2 driver software is full-featured and has been continuously upgraded, improved, and refined over many years of development. For example, with NI-488.2, you can develop multithreaded programs and programs that run on multiprocessor or hyperthreaded systems. This driver has been thoroughly tested in all these systems to ensure reliability and stability in use.
Vendor credibility Finally, the reliability of your GPIB vendors is also critical to the overall reliability of your application. NI has been manufacturing GPIB products for more than 20 years. In the past 20 years, we have had rich experience and a high level of professionalism in manufacturing such products, and we have maintained good long-term records and proof of achievements in supporting the old interfaces and providing the same compatible APIs. NI also passed the ISO9001:2000 certification, which indicates that our internal processes meet industry standards to further ensure the quality and reliability of our products.
Work efficiency In addition to high performance and reliability, one of the main factors you need to consider is work efficiency. Good work efficiency minimizes development time and reduces system and program maintenance. Using full-featured, reusable, and stable architecture drivers can dramatically increase your productivity.
Development Efficiency NIGPIB driver software NI-488.2 has numerous excellent features that help improve development efficiency and improve drive performance. Most of these features are unique to NI-488.2, and none of the other low-cost GPIB products on the market have these characteristics.
Universal Drive - NI provides a common GPIB driver software to control our GPIB controllers for PCI, PCI Express, PXI, PCMCIA, USB, Ethernet, and ISA (PnP) interfaces. Users can easily migrate applications from one platform to another without rewriting the program.
Driver Localization - NI-488.2 is available in Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional Chinese. Because the installation wizard and software use the user's native language, localization of drivers can simplify the installation, use, and programming of the board.
Technical Support - Through a wide variety of online support, NI offers award-winning world-class technical support. With these support you can respond to problems in a timely and accurate manner, ensuring that your project can be carried out smoothly and in a timely manner.
Multi-interface functionality - NI488.2 is one of the few driver software on the market that allows you to install and use multiple interfaces in the same system. For example, for a program that needs to respond to multiple instruments, the user can install PCI-GPIB on GPIB0 and GPIB-USB-B on GPIB1 to control multiple instruments that are independent of each other. Because of the NI488.2 driver has such features, the development of such a program is very simple. Because of this feature, users can replace a GPIB controller with another type of GPIB controller without modifying the software.
Tools - NI-488.2 has a number of tools that greatly increase development efficiency:
- Interactive control or ibic tools allow users to quickly communicate with the instrument. It has two simple versions of DOS-based tools and graphical user interfaces;
- With NISpy, users can record time stamps for all device hierarchy and board hierarchy function calls. Developers can use it to easily and effectively detect errors and time events in their programs.
- With the GPIB analyzer, the user can analyze the physical activity of the bus by viewing all GPIB handshake signals, interface management signals, and data signals. This feature is useful when using NISpy does not solve the problem. In addition, you can analyze bus time events in more detail. The GPIB analysis software is only applicable to NIGPIB analyzer boards. The boards of other GPIB vendors do not have similar functions.
Integration with NI Products - NI-488.2 integrates well with other NI products, including LabVIEW, LabWindows/CVI, Measurement Studio for Microsoft Visual Studio, and Measurement & Automation Explorer (MAX). Although some GPIB vendor's drivers provide NI-488.2 driver wrappers, these drivers are usually not perfect and can only work with LabVIEW, but they cannot provide configuration and debugging tools in MAX.
The stability of the architecture The NI-488.2 driver also boasts unparalleled architectural stability, so it is more conducive to improving work efficiency. Because the driver software and software architecture are very stable, users do not need to rewrite and debug the program when updating the bus interface or operating system of the application system.
Here are some features that help ensure the stability of the architecture:
API Compatibility - The NI-488.2 API is not only the industry standard for GPIB communications, but it has not changed for more than 20 years. With this stability, programs originally written for ISA boards for DOS systems or NuBus boards for Macintosh systems can be used on PCI boards running Windows XP without modification.
Covers a Wide Range of Bus Types - National Instruments offers GPIB controllers for a variety of buses. In addition to the current common buses such as PCI, PCI Express, PXI/CompactPCI, PCMCIA, USB, and Ethernet, NI also provides controllers on buses such as ISA, IEEE1394, SBus (SunSolaris), PMC, PC/104, and VME. Although some interfaces require a special version of the NI-488.2 driver, because the API is the same, you don't need any extra work when you convert a main interface program into a dedicated interface.
Openness to Operating System (OS) - NI is the most common operating system - such as Windows 2000/XP/NT/Me/9x, Linux, Solaris, and Mac OS X (as well as Mac OS 9.x and earlier Version) - Driver software that provides most bus interfaces. NI also provides drivers for bus interfaces on less commonly used operating systems such as HP-UX and Tru64 Digital UNIX. Finally, for those interfaces and operating systems that do not provide a complete driver, we have a Driver Development Kit (DDK) so you can choose the driver you want. Moreover, since these driver APIs are the same, users can easily migrate programs between different OSs and interfaces.
Product Availability - NI not only provides GPIB controllers for a variety of buses, but these products continue to be available when a bus is no longer commonly used. For example, NI currently sells interfaces on buses such as ISA, NuBus, and SBus. This ensures that you will not be updating the system because the old bus is no longer used.
Summary This article describes the NI GPIB hardware and software products, the advantages of performance. NIGPIB hardware and software products have high performance, high reliability and high work efficiency. With state-of-the-art hardware and highly optimized software products, NI helps you maximize data throughput and improve system performance. The stable performance of hardware and software products, plus the dominance of GPIB products for 20 years, NIGPIB products have absolute reliability. You can increase productivity with easy-to-use, efficient development and debugging tools and a stable software architecture.
With these advantages, NIGPIB products allow you to benefit from your work and help you achieve faster and faster product design, development and testing, and an ideal solution for high-efficiency and low-cost. Perhaps these advantages will not bring much gain in the short term, but over time, you will find that you are saving a lot of time and money.
1. Extended warranty for PCI, PCI Express, USB, ENET, and PCMCIA GPIB products with Windows 2000/XP 2.3 or later NI-488.2.
2. NI-488.2 for Windows 2000/XP version 2.3 or later includes Korean, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional Chinese.
Although all desktop and notebook computers in the world are equipped with RS232 interfaces, using GPIB interface to control instruments still requires special controller hardware. Unfortunately, many researchers and engineers often only consider the price factor when choosing to purchase instrument control hardware. They mistakenly believe that the GPIB interface card is just an ordinary commodity, and that it is the same for any controller that you choose. Does not matter.
This technical white paper will discuss the three main factors that determine the pros and cons of GPIB controllers. It will also detail some of the hardware and software features that can significantly increase the efficiency of your test and measurement system in all aspects, from more efficient application development to more High-speed, more stable and reliable application operation, and to ensure that the debug and maintenance are foolproof, will be discussed in the following content.
table of Contents:
· Three key factors · Operational performance · Reliability · Work efficiency · Summary
Three Key Factors When you purchase a GPIB controller for your instrument control system, remember that NI's GPIB controller offers you three unique advantages and attractive cost-effectiveness to ensure your Realize the most time-saving and cost-effective perfect solution for the entire system cycle.
High Performance - With unmatched hardware throughput and highly optimized driver software, you can conduct more tests in less time, resulting in a significant increase in overall efficiency while helping you achieve more product innovations , technological innovation, and then bring higher profits.
High reliability - The reliability of hardware and software guarantees your system to work continuously for a long time without any trouble and no longer needs to worry about an annoying and time-consuming fault interrupt. This high degree of reliability can reduce downtime and greatly save your time and cost.
High efficiency - configuration, troubleshooting, debugging tools, world-class technical support and 20 years of programming program interfaces (APIs) that have remained unchanged and in fact have become the industry standard, and the most extensive operating system support, such as feature achievements The most efficient and profitable development environment for ease of use. With these, you can ensure that the applications you need are created with the shortest time and effort, which further saves you valuable time and helps you to launch products faster.
In the following sections, we will focus on the three key aspects of GPIB controller hardware and analyze the obvious advantages of NI GPIB hardware and software features in these three areas. In addition, we compared with other non-NIGPIB hardware products to examine the benefits of NI solutions in both time and money savings.
Before further introduction, it should be noted that although these three aspects will be explored separately, it is impossible to completely separate them. For example, in order to increase the high reliability and power efficiency of the drive, the operating overhead within the system will increase, which will affect the performance of the system. The best combination of GPIB hardware and software is a good balance of features to provide the best performance, reliability and work efficiency. The ideal combination of GPIB software and hardware means a fine balance between the various conditions conducive to optimizing performance, reliability, and performance.
Performance When evaluating the overall performance of GPIB hardware, the most obvious specification is the data throughput of the board. For example, is the board's maximum data throughput 700 kB/s or 1.5 MB/s? However, in addition to the board speed, there are several other important factors that need to be carefully studied. These factors are concentrated in two aspects: 1) hardware speed, 2) drive speed.
The maximum data throughput rate of the hardware speed board is a very important technical indicator because it represents the fastest speed that the board can transmit data through the GPIB interface. The faster the transmission speed, the more data is transmitted in a shorter time. This is especially important in a product testing environment, because a few milliseconds of product testing time can save a lot of costs. It is also very important to examine the data transfer rate of GPIB boards in different transmission capacities. For example, is the performance of the block using smaller blocks and larger blocks to deliver data? Is the data throughput rate of the board consistent within the entire data transfer block size range? Figure 1 shows how NIPCI-GPIB can achieve performance for different sizes of data blocks.
The NIPCI-GPIB has a maximum transfer rate of more than 1.5MB/s, and its transmission rate is higher than 1MB/s when it uses a common transmission capacity of 500B. In addition, the board works well even if the transmitted data block is below 500B.
NI is relying on specially designed GPIB ASIC technology to improve product performance. NI hardware uses NI TNT GPIB ASIC chips. In addition to the specialized NAT4882 circuit to implement the IEEE 488.2 controller/call/listen function, NI TNTASIC also features the Turbo488 performance enhancement core and the required GPIB transceiver. In addition, NI TNTASIC also includes onboard FIFO and DMA transfer functions, it can not use CPU time, because the PC in the process of GPIB data transmission can still focus on performing other tasks.
In contrast, many low-cost GPIB vendors directly use the GPIBASIC of the cloned NEC PD7210 or TI TMS9914A. Although these ASICs are also relatively reliable, they do not have any features in NI TNTASIC that help improve performance, nor do they have on-board transceivers. Not only that, many low-cost boards do not provide DMA functionality and do not have on-board FIFOs, so hardware runs at a low speed.
NI TNT ASICs also have other features that complement their ability to improve performance. The NI TNT ASIC ensures full compliance/ compliance with the IEEE 488.1T1 latency criteria, ensuring that the instrument does not lose data and transfer data as efficiently as possible. In addition, NI TNTASIC's fast response to handshake signals is incredible. Finally, NI TNTASIC also has HS488, the high-speed handshake protocol defined by IEEE Standard 488.1-2003. The HS488 protocol defines a data throughput rate of 8MB/s. Users can use the HS488 protocol if they use the NI GPIB controller to connect HS488-enabled instruments. NI TNTASIC-enabled instruments can use HS488 in the firmware.
Compared with other PCI GPIB controller vendors, NI's PCI-GPIB hardware has obvious advantages in terms of performance. In addition to these standard features of NI calibration, the industry has also conducted a special test to load a device under test into a programmable electronic device and use an oscilloscope to read the response. These test instruments are controlled by a very simple software program. The program is very flexible and can send or receive data in small, large, and mixed chunks. By comparing the performance of NIGPIB hardware and low-cost GPIB boards, it can be seen that NI boards can increase performance by 5%-30%. The significance of this obvious advantage is quite remarkable. For example, with 10 hours as a shift, the test time for each device is 20 seconds. When the performance is improved by 5% to 30%, it means that 110 to 820 devices can be tested in the same time. Within five days of a week, the quantified effect of optimized performance is equivalent to an additional 570 to 4,120 devices.
Drive Speed ​​Although hardware speed is the most important factor in determining the overall performance of the entire GPIB board, the speed of the drive software is another key indicator that reflects the overall performance of the board. The design of the driver software architecture determines the efficiency of controlling various types of GPIB calls, including GPIB data transfer and GPIB bus management calls and error handling.
One of the important tasks of the driver is serial polling. The GPIB standard requires the controller to implement serial polling, which is to poll all devices on the GPIB bus and determine which device has requested service. The program must have dedicated processing time for serial polling to determine which device on the bus is requesting service. The NI-488.2 driver implements this function in a very efficient manner, and also provides an automatic polling mechanism, where the driver performs serial polling in the background and takes full advantage of program and processor idle times. Auto-polling not only makes more efficient use of PC resources, but it can also detect and respond to service requests much faster than other methods.
In addition to being able to poll, it is also important to drive synchronous and asynchronous data transfer functions. Through asynchronous data transfer, the instrument control program can help the PC processor make time for other tasks. For example, a program can have two synchronization cycles, one for GPIB transfers and the other for other analysis or user interface processing jobs.
Finally, since the NIGPIB driver API has become an accepted industry standard, the driver provided by a low-cost GPIB vendor generally responds to calls to the NI driver in a packaged manner. Because these driver developers do not understand the internal structure of NI drives and their complex principles, they cannot optimize their drivers. This reduces the performance of these packaged drives. In addition, it is difficult for the driver developer to provide a wrapper that can contain all the functions of the NI driver. This will result in some application development programs lacking some necessary functions.
Reliability The second important factor to consider when choosing a GPIB solution is reliability. It includes not only the reliability of the GPIB hardware, but also the reliability of the software and the credibility of the vendor.
Hardware reliability It is important to use a highly reliable hardware product because it represents a significant degree of system cost savings. If the hardware is very reliable and it works without any problems, you can save on the costs of downtime and hardware replacement and revalidation. NI has spared no effort to explore and only achieve the perfection of its GPIB hardware reliability. The features listed below help NI achieve this height:
· Custom ASIC - NI uses a customizable TNT ASIC, which is a crystal-clear and efficient design of GPIB development engineers' nearly 30 years of engineering experience - by using a specialized ASIC, NI has reduced its use in the design. The number of devices reduces the probability of failure. For example, the mean time between failure (MTBF) of a product is calculated based on the time of failure of each device that makes up the product. The fewer devices the product uses, the longer its MTBF.
· Environmental Specifications - Most NI GPIB hardware has the same accuracy and reliability in the 0 to 55°C range (individual products may vary). Many third-party GPIB boards operate in the 0 to 40°C range, and their functionality changes as they approach critical ranges.
· Industry specifications - NI GPIB hardware complies with the latest industry specifications, including IEEE488.1-2003 and the NI PCI-GPIB 2.1 PCI specification.
• Productivity – It is critical that your GPIB vendor has reliable manufacturing processes to ensure high-quality products. NI has been developing ice-producing GPIB products for more than 20 years. Optimized processes can increase product yields and ensure high-quality products. So NI's GPIB products have very low repair rates.
· Hardware Warranty - NIGPIB hardware has hardly any fault precedents, but it still offers a 2-year warranty. The purpose is to ensure that users do not have to bear any product maintenance costs even if they actually have problems with failure within two years. In addition, if some GPIB products are registered online, NI adds a one-year free warranty to these products. This 3-year warranty covers 95% of all available products.
Software reliability Reliable software support guarantees minimal downtime and develops and runs GPIB programs on a wider range of system platforms. The NI-488.2 driver software is full-featured and has been continuously upgraded, improved, and refined over many years of development. For example, with NI-488.2, you can develop multithreaded programs and programs that run on multiprocessor or hyperthreaded systems. This driver has been thoroughly tested in all these systems to ensure reliability and stability in use.
Vendor credibility Finally, the reliability of your GPIB vendors is also critical to the overall reliability of your application. NI has been manufacturing GPIB products for more than 20 years. In the past 20 years, we have had rich experience and a high level of professionalism in manufacturing such products, and we have maintained good long-term records and proof of achievements in supporting the old interfaces and providing the same compatible APIs. NI also passed the ISO9001:2000 certification, which indicates that our internal processes meet industry standards to further ensure the quality and reliability of our products.
Work efficiency In addition to high performance and reliability, one of the main factors you need to consider is work efficiency. Good work efficiency minimizes development time and reduces system and program maintenance. Using full-featured, reusable, and stable architecture drivers can dramatically increase your productivity.
Development Efficiency NIGPIB driver software NI-488.2 has numerous excellent features that help improve development efficiency and improve drive performance. Most of these features are unique to NI-488.2, and none of the other low-cost GPIB products on the market have these characteristics.
Universal Drive - NI provides a common GPIB driver software to control our GPIB controllers for PCI, PCI Express, PXI, PCMCIA, USB, Ethernet, and ISA (PnP) interfaces. Users can easily migrate applications from one platform to another without rewriting the program.
Driver Localization - NI-488.2 is available in Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional Chinese. Because the installation wizard and software use the user's native language, localization of drivers can simplify the installation, use, and programming of the board.
Technical Support - Through a wide variety of online support, NI offers award-winning world-class technical support. With these support you can respond to problems in a timely and accurate manner, ensuring that your project can be carried out smoothly and in a timely manner.
Multi-interface functionality - NI488.2 is one of the few driver software on the market that allows you to install and use multiple interfaces in the same system. For example, for a program that needs to respond to multiple instruments, the user can install PCI-GPIB on GPIB0 and GPIB-USB-B on GPIB1 to control multiple instruments that are independent of each other. Because of the NI488.2 driver has such features, the development of such a program is very simple. Because of this feature, users can replace a GPIB controller with another type of GPIB controller without modifying the software.
Tools - NI-488.2 has a number of tools that greatly increase development efficiency:
- Interactive control or ibic tools allow users to quickly communicate with the instrument. It has two simple versions of DOS-based tools and graphical user interfaces;
- With NISpy, users can record time stamps for all device hierarchy and board hierarchy function calls. Developers can use it to easily and effectively detect errors and time events in their programs.
- With the GPIB analyzer, the user can analyze the physical activity of the bus by viewing all GPIB handshake signals, interface management signals, and data signals. This feature is useful when using NISpy does not solve the problem. In addition, you can analyze bus time events in more detail. The GPIB analysis software is only applicable to NIGPIB analyzer boards. The boards of other GPIB vendors do not have similar functions.
Integration with NI Products - NI-488.2 integrates well with other NI products, including LabVIEW, LabWindows/CVI, Measurement Studio for Microsoft Visual Studio, and Measurement & Automation Explorer (MAX). Although some GPIB vendor's drivers provide NI-488.2 driver wrappers, these drivers are usually not perfect and can only work with LabVIEW, but they cannot provide configuration and debugging tools in MAX.
The stability of the architecture The NI-488.2 driver also boasts unparalleled architectural stability, so it is more conducive to improving work efficiency. Because the driver software and software architecture are very stable, users do not need to rewrite and debug the program when updating the bus interface or operating system of the application system.
Here are some features that help ensure the stability of the architecture:
API Compatibility - The NI-488.2 API is not only the industry standard for GPIB communications, but it has not changed for more than 20 years. With this stability, programs originally written for ISA boards for DOS systems or NuBus boards for Macintosh systems can be used on PCI boards running Windows XP without modification.
Covers a Wide Range of Bus Types - National Instruments offers GPIB controllers for a variety of buses. In addition to the current common buses such as PCI, PCI Express, PXI/CompactPCI, PCMCIA, USB, and Ethernet, NI also provides controllers on buses such as ISA, IEEE1394, SBus (SunSolaris), PMC, PC/104, and VME. Although some interfaces require a special version of the NI-488.2 driver, because the API is the same, you don't need any extra work when you convert a main interface program into a dedicated interface.
Openness to Operating System (OS) - NI is the most common operating system - such as Windows 2000/XP/NT/Me/9x, Linux, Solaris, and Mac OS X (as well as Mac OS 9.x and earlier Version) - Driver software that provides most bus interfaces. NI also provides drivers for bus interfaces on less commonly used operating systems such as HP-UX and Tru64 Digital UNIX. Finally, for those interfaces and operating systems that do not provide a complete driver, we have a Driver Development Kit (DDK) so you can choose the driver you want. Moreover, since these driver APIs are the same, users can easily migrate programs between different OSs and interfaces.
Product Availability - NI not only provides GPIB controllers for a variety of buses, but these products continue to be available when a bus is no longer commonly used. For example, NI currently sells interfaces on buses such as ISA, NuBus, and SBus. This ensures that you will not be updating the system because the old bus is no longer used.
Summary This article describes the NI GPIB hardware and software products, the advantages of performance. NIGPIB hardware and software products have high performance, high reliability and high work efficiency. With state-of-the-art hardware and highly optimized software products, NI helps you maximize data throughput and improve system performance. The stable performance of hardware and software products, plus the dominance of GPIB products for 20 years, NIGPIB products have absolute reliability. You can increase productivity with easy-to-use, efficient development and debugging tools and a stable software architecture.
With these advantages, NIGPIB products allow you to benefit from your work and help you achieve faster and faster product design, development and testing, and an ideal solution for high-efficiency and low-cost. Perhaps these advantages will not bring much gain in the short term, but over time, you will find that you are saving a lot of time and money.
1. Extended warranty for PCI, PCI Express, USB, ENET, and PCMCIA GPIB products with Windows 2000/XP 2.3 or later NI-488.2.
2. NI-488.2 for Windows 2000/XP version 2.3 or later includes Korean, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional Chinese.