I am a Ph.D. student at the Dept. of Microelectonics of the TU
Hamburg-Harburg. One of our research fields is the development of
mixed-signal ASICs for biomedical applications. For testing purposes, we
currently use a DSP from Texas Instruments to request/send data from/to the
ASICs. Such ASICs carry on a digital interface to communicate with external
devices (e.g. ucontrollers, DSPs, etc).The requested data is forwarded via
serial port (RS-232) to a computer for further signal processing with
Matlab. We have had our little issues with the DSP-board and would like to
migrate to a more direct interfacing between the computer and our ASICs,
i.e., to a digital I/O card, that also facilitates the software development
for testing of the ASIC's performance.
I will briefly discuss how the digital interface works, so you can recommend
me a possible NI configuration that can be used to accomplish the task. The
digital interface has an 8-bit data bus, a 5-bit address bus, 3 control
lines (/Read, /Write, /ChipEnable) and an output interrupt signal. The
interrupt signal toggles at a max. rate of 50 kHz, each time it is active at
least ten (10) 20-bit data words must be sent to an external processing unit
(currently the DSP-computer system). Each 20-bit word is splitted into three
(3) 8-bit chunks for them to be sent thru the data bus, where each chunk is
mapped to a address.
I think a Digital I/O card that can be controlled by a program written in
Delphi or Matlab (I use them quite often to develop software to test the
ASICs!) could do the job. Glancing at the NI website the NI DAQCard-6533 came
across (still the product manual has to be read). However, I think that with
the brief explanation of what it is intended to do, someone could be give me a
better advise about a NI Digital I/O card that fits into
our needs.
I really appreciate your time and help.
Best regards,
Alexander Mora-Sanchez
