Glossary
PXI-PCI 8330 Series User Manual
G-2
www.ni.com
C
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)
D
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 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.
I
IEEE
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
M
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 PCI bus.
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.
