National Instruments’ products for the general-purpose interface bus (GPIB, IEC Bus) support the recently upgraded IEEE-488.1–2003 standard and increase data transfer rates to 8MB/s, up from 1MB/s. All its GPIB products are compliant with the upgraded standard. This first revision of the IEEE-488 standard since 1987 reflects users’ interest in improving the speed. Engineers have used GPIB for almost 30 years, and it has been built into millions of instruments worldwide. The bus offers communication between controllers (usually a PC) and instruments such as oscilloscopes, spectrum analyzers or digital multimeters used in research, manufacturing, test and production settings. Using the de facto standard NI-488.2 driver software, engineers can today use the same GPIB applications that were written more than 20 years ago when the standard was first introduced. To take advantage of the higher speed of the standard, both the GPIB controller and the instrument must comply with the new standard. Both the recent upgrade of the IEEE-488 standard and the large installed base of test and measurement systems make GPIB an attractive option alongside emerging alternatives such as ethernet and USB. In addition, with instrument drivers, application software such as LabVIEW, users can integrate multiple connectivity options in a single test system and easily migrate applications from GPIB to ethernet or USB instruments.
EPP EUROPE 461
