NEWS RELEASE – Jan. 25, 2005 – National Instruments today announced two new eight-port serial boards that achieve high-speed data rates up to 2 Mb/s and incorporate NI-Mite ASIC technology. The NI PCI-8430/8 and PCI-8431/8 improve CPU utilization by 15 times compared to traditional plug-in serial interfaces and offer dramatic improvements in speed, reliability and performance compared to native desktop serial ports. The new boards expand the NI PCI-843x family of serial boards to offer simultaneous communication on up to eight RS232, RS485 or RS422 serial ports.The NI-Mite ASIC technology included in the new boards delivers DMA memory mapping, PCI bus mastering and scatter-gather technology for superior CPU utilization.
Engineers can communicate on all eight ports simultaneously at rates up to 2 Mb/s with little or no effect on the CPU, freeing up the processor for virtual instrumentation applications that include data acquisition, analysis and presentation. The new PCI-8430/8 and PCI-8431/8 also offer flexible baud rates to achieve between 57 b/s and 2 Mb/s for non-standard rates, and to within 1 percent accuracy and 0.01 percent accuracy for standard rates. The PCI-8430/8 and PCI-8431/8 serial boards are ideal for engineers and scientists wanting to communicate with many instruments or devices simultaneously under test.
For example, companies testing cell phones during manufacturing can use the new eight-port boards to test more phones at the same time, which speeds up and streamlines the manufacturing process. The new boards include NI-Serial driver software that works with any NI development environment, including National Instruments LabVIEW, LabWindows/CVI and Measurement Studio for Microsoft Visual Studio .NET.
Engineers can take advantage of the more than 4,000 instruments drivers from more than 200 vendors available at www.ni.com.idnet to quickly configure and control their instruments and measurement hardware, saving valuable programming time.
For additional information on these Serial Boards
, Contact National Instruments or visit their web site at www.ni.com .
About National Instruments
National Instruments ( www.ni.com ) is 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 the PC and its related technologies, virtual instrumentation increases productivity and lowers costs through easy-to-integrate software, such as the NI LabVIEW graphical development environment, and modular hardware, such as PXI modules for data acquisition, instrument control and machine vision. Headquartered in Austin, Texas, NI has more than 3,100 employees and direct operations in 41 countries.
In 2003, the company sold products to more than 25,000 companies in 90 countries. For the past six years, FORTUNE magazine named NI one of the 100 best companies to work for in America.
