Glossary
©
National Instruments Corporation
G-11
SC-2311 User Manual
pattern generation
a type of handshaked (latched) digital I/O in which internal counters
generate the handshaked signal, which in turn initiates a digital transfer.
Because counters output digital pulses at a constant rate, this means you
can generate and retrieve patterns at a constant rate because the handshaked
signal is produced at a constant rate.
PC Card
a credit-card-sized expansion card that fits in a PCMCIA slot often referred
to as a PCMCIA card
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 work-stations;
it offers a theoretical maximum transfer rate of 132 Mbytes/s.
PCMCIA
an expansion bus architecture that has found widespread acceptance as a
standard in notebook-size computers. It originated as a specification for
add-on memory cards written by the Personal Computer Memory Card
International Association.
peak to peak
a measure of signal amplitude; the difference between the highest and
lowest excursions of the signal
PFI
programmable function input
PGIA
programmable gain instrumentation amplifier
pipeline
(1) a high-performance processor structure in which the completion of an
instruction is broken into its elements so that several elements can be
processed simultaneously from different instructions (2) also refers to
pipelined ADC that requires several conversions to produce output from the
ADC
Plug and Play
devices
devices that do not require DIP switches or jumpers to configure resources
on the devices—also called switchless devices
port
(1) a communications connection on a computer or a remote controller
(2) a digital port, consisting of four or eight lines of digital input and/or
output
posttriggering
the technique used on a DAQ device to acquire a programmed number of
samples after trigger conditions are met
potentiometer
an electrical device the resistance of which can be manually adjusted; used
for manual adjustment of electrical circuits and as a transducer for linear or
rotary position
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