Agilent Technologies Announces the Industry's First High-Speed AXIe Digitizer for Large-Scale Applied Physics

04/09/2012

Agilent Technologies Inc. introduced the high-speed M9703A digitizer, the industry's first eight-channel, 12-bit digitizer that complies with the AXIe open standard. The AXIe digitizer is designed for use in large-scale applied physics applications.

The M9703A digitizer is capable of use in large-scale system configurations that pack 40 channels within a single 4U Agilent M9505A AXIe chassis or 80 channels into just 8U of rack-mount space giving it twice the channel density of comparable solutions. This makes the new digitizer well-suited for challenging experiments in particle physics, nuclear fusion, hydrodynamics and microwave radio astronomy.

The M9703A is a single-slot AXIe module with four- or eight-channel acquisition capability running at 1 GSa/s to 3.2 GSa/s. It can provide more than 1 GHz of instantaneous analog bandwidth. The digitizer also enables long acquisitions with its very large on-board memory of up to 4 GB.

To ensure high throughput, the digitizer module provides a four-lane (x4) PCI Express Gen 2 backplane, enabling sustained data transfer rates of up to 1 GB/s. With four on-board Xilinx Virtex-6 FPGAs, the M9703A also optimizes measurement throughput and supports future implementations of high-performance data processing.

The M9703A digitizer is compliant with the AXIe and AdvancedTCA(r) standards. Designed to benefit from fast data interfaces, the module can be plugged into AXIe or AdvancedTCA chassis slots.

"This new AXIe digitizer drastically simplifies the creation of very dense data acquisition systems that include a large number of high-speed synchronous channels with wide dynamic range," said Didier Lavanchy, Agilent's high-speed digitizer operation manager. "In advanced applications such as high-energy physics experiments, the M9703A provides excellent measurement fidelity from DC to 1 GHz with up to 9.4 effective bits, 66 dBc spurious-free dynamic range and 59 dB signal-to-noise ratio."

The M9703A AXIe digitizer extends Agilent's portfolio of AXIe based products, and high-speed digitizers modules, which also includes solutions in the CompactPCI(r) format. To ease module integration into systems containing Agilent CompactPCI digitizer modules, the M9703A includes a comprehensive set of module drivers and a soft-front-panel graphical interface that also support other Agilent high-speed digitizer products.

More information about product configuration and pricing is available at www.agilent.com/find/M9703A.

Agilent Technologies Inc., www.agilent.com.