Innovative modular high-speed data-acquisition architecture

This paper reports on the development of a new high-speed modular data-acquisition architecture, capable of covering the most demanding applications concerning sampling time and the combination of sampling time with memory-per-channel capability, along with sophisticated functionality for easy system integration. The proposed modular architecture also directly addresses the common problem of trigger generation and delivery by implementing a large (several tens of megabytes), low-cost circular memory. This allows for a large delay in the delivery time of the trigger signal (up to tens of milliseconds while acquiring data at 1 GSPS) without incurring any data lost or dead time.