PCI bus Data Acquisition Card

Theta Engineering did the circuit design, including the logic design of a 100K-gate Xilinx FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) chip, for a PCI-bus data acquisition and control card for Pacific Nanotech's line of atomic force microscopes. This design reduced cost by replacing two off-the-shelf I/O cards. It implements an 8-channel 16-bit 250KHz ADC (Analog to Digital Converter), 2-channel 16-bit 64KHz DAC (Digital to Analog Converter), and 128 bits of digital I/O. It also implements specific functions needed for atomic-force microscopy allowing greater system performance while reducing the burden on the host computer.