A First Approach Towards a High-Speed PCI-based Data Acquisition Card for Industrial Applications

The Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) bus is the fastest communication protocol available for off-the-shelf Personal Computers (PCs). It is a suitable base for designing cost-effective Data Acquisition Cards (DAQs). These can achieve a high data throughput, making them ideal for implementation into different industrial environments. In this document, a PCI prototype card is presented, which is the first step for the development of a high-performance low-cost DAQ card. Moreover, with this card, the empirical PCI DMA transfer rate of two host PCs was measured, offering real empirical results of the PCI bus performance, instead of the well known theoretical 132 Mbytes/s (33 MHz, 32-bit). This theoretical value is not a reliable reference for designing a PCI DAQ card as, in fact, this data transfer bandwidth cannot be achieved.