Evaluation Engineering - 22

DIGITIZERS, AWG'S

testing, and calibration take place here at
SPECTRUM.

shut-down sequence of the fastmoving particle beam. At DESY
in Hamburg, such cards have
been monitoring the acceleration
magnets of all three particle accelerators for the past 15 years.

In 2000 and 2001, what
was unique about your
approach to moving to
modular PCI products?
Gisela Hassler: In the
past, every product was
developed f rom the
scratch. This involved a
new risk with every development. When Oliver
Rov ini took over the
technical management
in August 2000, he and his
team of engineers directly implemented
the modular design of the digitizer and
AWG cards. A platform board containing the bus interface and the controller
is combined with one or two analog modules that house the data-acquisition and
preamplifier functions. This allowed us
to launch a wide variety of products in a
short period of time, and customers were
able to get a product that was right for
them without having to pay for overperformance-hence the slogan "Perfect fit,
modular designed solutions." The modular
design has been maintained since then
and will continue in the future, as it has
made a significant contribution to the
company's success.
The digitizerNETBOX introduced in
2013 was your first stand-alone product.
Why did you choose this route instead
of developing more PXI cards that could
fit into an already existing PXI chassis?
Oliver Rovini: We saw an increasing demand for stand-alone products that don't
need a PC or PXI host system and a bunch
of plug-in cards. The digitizerNETBOX is
extremely easy to use and connects to any
PC or laptop. It can be carried around
(weighing less than 7 kgs) and can be
shared in a lab. Furthermore, customers don't need to think about available
systems, power supply, cooling, system
noise, size, or matching kernel drivers. The
digitizerNETBOX and later the generatorNETBOX opened up new application

EVALUATION ENGINEERING DECEMBER 2019

Looking back over 30 years,
what do you see as the most
significant benchmarks or
milestones related to performance (such as sampling rate)
and form factor?
Eight-bit digitizer card with 5-GS/s
sampling rate.

areas that can't be easily served by PCIe
or PXIe plug-in cards.
Can you cite some customers and their
applications?
Gisela Hassler: At the University of
Tokyo, a 12-channel digitizerNETBOX
was involved in creating the strongest
indoor magnetic field in the world. The
main advantage of our NETBOX was
the ability to be fully remote-controlled
from the control room, because staying
in the vicinity of the giant magnets was
hazardous to health.
The University of Stuttgart uses our
arbitrary waveform generators and a laser to excite individually doted nitrogen
atoms in a diamond, which can then be
used as a mini-compass or as Qbits for
a quantum computer. To control individual atoms, an AWG must be extremely
low-noise and extremely precise in design. At Caltech and at the University of
San Diego, our cards are therefore used
to move individual atoms through a
nuclear lattice for basic research.
In England, a new concept is being
used to realize a fusion reactor in only
four years. To start the fusion process,
a projectile is fired with extremely high
energy and precision in a vacuum,
monitored by our 256-channel digitizer
systems.
The world's largest particle accelerator at CERN uses 140 SPECTRUM digitizer cards to control the complicated

Oliver Rovini: For us the biggest milestone was for sure the development of the
M4i Series in 2013, lifting the acquisition
speed from 1 GS/s to 5 GS/s and the continuous streaming speed from 160 MB/s
to 3.4 GB/s. The development was a major
step for SPECTRUM as the clock section,
timing, analog signal quality, and the
new 8-lane Gen2 PCIe interface inside
the FPGA all had to be done completely
new from scratch. Today we have more
than 50 products on this platform with a
PCIe and PXIe interface and have a very
reliable product series with outstanding
performance that is selling very well.
What are some of the key products you
are currently offering?
Oliver Rovini: There are the already-mentioned M4i.223x digitizer products with
eight bits and a 5-GS/s sampling rate. The
very fast rearming time, 64 ns between
trigger events, and the block-average
option make them an ideal match for
many applications. The M4i.663x 1.25GS/s AWG Series, which has a mixture
of analog and digital (marker) outputs,
is doing very well serving physical experiments like quantum research. The
new small-size M2p platform, which has
been released in 2018 and 2019, is a modern general-purpose digitizer and AWG
platform with a sampling rate of up to
125 MS/s and has up to eight channels
per card or 128 synchronous channels
per system. Combining the card with the
recently released digital option, one can
set up a mixed-mode system with synchronous fast analog and digital input
and output channels.

Evaluation Engineering

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