NI Introduces First PCI Express High-Speed Digital Instruments up to 200 MB/s.

New High-Speed Boards Lower Cost and Increase Data Throughput for Digital Test

AUSTIN, Texas -- National Instruments (Nasdaq: NATI) today announced the industry's first high-speed digital I/O instruments for PCI Express to deliver up to 200 MB/s dedicated throughput per direction to and from the host processor. The NI PCIe-6536 25 MHz and NI PCIe-6537 50 MHz low-cost digital I/O boards build on the throughput of the PCI Express interface to acquire and generate large digital patterns that are otherwise impossible to sustain. Using this high-performance bus, the new digital I/O boards can directly stream data to and from the host processor at full data rates with increased performance and lower costs than traditional proprietary test systems. Engineers can use the new instruments to meet a variety of applications including interfacing to memory devices, emulating communications protocols and testing image sensors and display panels.

The new NI PCIe-6536 and NI PCIe-6537 digital I/O boards offer a flexible, universal parallel interface that is entirely software configurable. The digital boards feature maximum clock rates of 25 MHz and 50 MHz across 32 channels for maximum sustainable throughput of 100 MB/s and 200 MB/s, respectively. Engineers can set the direction of each channel for acquisition or generation and can choose from 2.5, 3.3 or 5.0 V TTL compliant logic levels per direction. The boards are capable of both synchronous and asynchronous timing modes for applications including pattern I/O, handshaking and change detection. Engineers also can easily synchronize the new PCI Express digital boards with other PCI Express data acquisition boards to create powerful mixed-signal test systems.

Devices built on slower buses, such as LAN, PCI or GPIB, require large amounts of expensive, onboard memory to acquire and generate long waveforms at the maximum data rates of the instruments. The new digital devices take advantage of the high bandwidth of PCI Express and use inexpensive PC memory to increase performance while reducing the overall cost of the board.

Engineers can further reduce the development and maintenance costs of a new digital test system by using NI-DAQmx driver software and graphical programming to rapidly prototype their systems. Customers can reuse existing digital applications written with the NI-DAQmx API for the popular NI 6533 and NI 6534 digital devices with their new PCI Express instruments. The boards are also compatible with NI Digital Waveform Editor software for interactively creating, editing and importing digital waveforms. The new instruments seamlessly integrate with the National Instruments LabVIEW graphical programming platform, LabWindows/CVI software for ANSI C development and NI TestStand test management software.

About National Instruments

For 30 years, National Instruments (www.ni.com) has been a technology pioneer and leader in virtual instrumentation - a revolutionary concept that has changed the way engineers and scientists in industry, government and academia approach measurement and automation. Leveraging PCs and commercial technologies, virtual instrumentation increases productivity and lowers costs for test, control and design applications through easy-to-integrate software, such as NI LabVIEW, and modular measurement and control hardware for PXI, PCI, PCI Express, PXI Express, USB and Ethernet. Headquartered in Austin, Texas, NI has 4,000 employees and direct operations in nearly 40 countries. For the past seven years, FORTUNE magazine has named NI one of the 100 best companies to work for in America.

Readers can obtain investment information from the company's investor relations department by calling [phone], e-mailing [e-mail] or visiting www.ni.com/nati.

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