USB controller for GPIB

Engineers and scientists now can use the latest USB standard, USB 2.0 high-speed, to control GPIB instruments at transfer rates of up to 8 MBytes/sec.

The new National Instruments GPIB-USB-HS, claimed to be the industry’s fastest USB-to-GPIB controller, is the latest in the broad offering of NI instrument control products for PCI Express, Ethernet, PCI, USB, PCMCIA and other interfaces.

The NI GPIB-USB-HS controller incorporates an NI TNT GPIB ASIC and a USB 2.0 high-speed chip to achieve GPIB transfer rates comparable to those of the high-performance NI PCI-GPIB plug-in board. With GPIB transfer rates of up to 1.8 MByte/s (14.4 Mbit/s) in standard IEEE 488.1 and 8 MByte/s (64 Mbit/s) in high-speed IEEE 488.1 (HS488), the NI GPIB-USB-HS provides a 2X performance improvement over existing USB-to-GPIB controllers.

With the GPIB-USB-HS, engineers can run existing GPIB applications without modifying their code because the controller uses the popular NI-488.2 and Virtual Instrument Software Architecture (VISA) APIs.