Viewpoint Introduces New Intelligent Digital Input/Output Board

Introducing the latest version of the input/output board that brought the world to a standstill… or at least a small part of it.

ROCHESTER, NY- Viewpoint Systems has just introduced a faster, more intelligent version of its popular DIO64 intelligent input/output board, an improvement on the board that is helping researchers at the University of Colorado stop molecular movement in its tracks.

"Our original DIO board was smart and fast, but the new DIO64 offers even more speed, flexibility and intelligence for the most demanding high-performance timing analysis applications," said Dave Smith, Viewpoint Systems Engineer/DIO-64 Project Manager.

Beyond its speed, what makes the DIO-64 so remarkable is the on-board intelligence which enables it to record or output only when there's a change in data, which tremendously reduces the amount of data being relayed through the PC bus, substantially simplifying the rest of the application Smith said.

"When researchers at the University of Colorado needed a super-fast, super-exacting way to control time-varying electromagnetic fields for their experiments to decelerate and trap neutral dipolar molecules, the DIO64 was the only choice," Smith said.

Slowing down neutral molecules, which must be done before they can be trapped, has proven to be considerably more difficult than first thought he said. Laser-cooling schemes failed and an alternative, slowing them down by passing them through electromagnetic fields, requires incredibly precise timing and high-speed data transmission.

"It's something that simply could not be done using a standard PC card," Smith said. "The outputting signals that control the electromagnetic fields, turning them on and off, happen in microseconds and must follow an extremely precise sequence or a molecule will be missed. A standard PC card is simply too slow, especially since it would have to upload the data to be processed by the PC."

Because of the on-board intelligence of the DIO64, it can be programmed to control the sequence, not the PC. Its speed and the fact that it only sends a signal when there is a data change, makes it the perfect solution, the only solution, to a complex problem he said.

The new generation DIO-64 boards are available now in PCI, PCI Compact and PXI versions, including software, and Viewpoint engineers are available to discuss how it might fit into any specific high-performance timing analysis application, he added. Inquiries can be made by phone to Bob Grimm at (585) 475-9555. More information and detailed specifications can be found on our DIO64 page.