Software
Card Control Center
(c) Spectrum GmbH
37
particular card with the serial number given in the license. To install the software license please click the „Install SW License“ button and type
in the code exactly as given in the license.
Performing card calibration
The card control center also provides an easy way to access the
automatic card calibration routines of the Spectrum A/D convert-
er cards. Depending on the used card family this can affect offset
calibration only or also might include gain calibration. Please re-
fer to the dedicated chapter in your hardware manual for details.
Performing memory test
The complete on-board memory of the Spectrum M2i/M3i/M4i/M4x cards can
be tested by the memory test included with the card control center.
When starting the test, randomized data is generated and written to the on-
board memory. After a complete write cycle all the data is read back and com-
pared with the generated pattern.
Depending on the amount of installed on-board memory, and your computers
performance this operation might take a while.
Transfer speed test
The control center allows to measure the bus transfer
speed of an installed Spectrum card. Therefore different
setup is run multiple times and the overall bus transfer
speed is measured. To get reliable results it is necessary
that you disable debug logging as shown above. It is also
highly recommended that no other software or time-con-
suming background threads are running on that system.
The speed test program runs the following two tests:
• Repetitive Memory Transfers: single DMA data trans-
fers are repeated and measured. This test simulates
the measuring of pulse repetition frequency when
doing multiple single-shots. The test is done using dif-
ferent block sizes. One can estimate the transfer in
relation to the transferred data size on multiple single-shots.
• FIFO mode streaming: this test measures the streaming speed in FIFO mode. The test can only use the same direction of transfer the card
has been designed for (card to PC=read for all DAQ cards, PC to card=write for all generator cards and both directions for I/O cards).
The streaming speed is tested without using the front-end to measure the maximum bus speed that can be reached.
The Speed in FIFO mode depends on the selected notify size which is explained later in this manual in greater detail.
The results are given in MB/s meaning MByte per second. To estimate whether a desired acquisition speed is possible to reach one has to
calculate the transfer speed in bytes. There are a few things that has to be put into the calculation:
• 12, 14 and 16 bit analog cards need two bytes for each sample.
• 16 channel digital cards need 2 bytes per sample while 32 channel digital cards need 4 bytes and 64 channel digital cards need 8
bytes.
• The sum of analog channels must be used to calculate the total transfer rate.
• The figures in the Speed Test Utility are given as MBytes, meaning 1024 * 1024 Bytes, 1 MByte = 1048576 Bytes
As an example running a card with 2 14 bit analog channels with 28 MHz produces a transfer rate of [2 channels * 2 Bytes/Sample *
28000000] = 112000000 Bytes/second. Taking the above figures measured on a standard 33 MHz PCI slot the system is just capable of
reaching this transfer speed: 108.0 MB/s = 108 * 1024 * 1024 = 113246208 Bytes/second.
Unfortunately it is not possible to measure transfer speed on a system without having a Spectrum card installed.
