Spectrum Instrumentation just rolled out a new firmware option that brings onboard summation averaging directly to its high-resolution 59xx series digitizers.
By handling the averaging right on the onboard FPGA, the hardware drastically cuts down the amount of data you need to store or shuttle across the bus for analysis.
The payoff is a highly efficient processing pipeline that can average high-repetition-rate signals at up to 2 million events per second, crushing unwanted noise while boosting measurement resolution, dynamic range, and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR).
The 59xx Series Architecture
The 59xx lineup covers 24 PCIe cards and 28 Ethernet-based instruments, delivering 16-bit resolution and real-time sampling rates from 5 MS/s up to 125 MS/s.
Channel counts scale from 1 to 8 on the PCIe cards and up to 48 on the standalone ethernet units.
For massive scale, linking the PCIe cards via Spectrum’s proprietary Star-Hub creates a fully synchronized acquisition system with up to 128 channels, streaming data to a PC or GPU at up to 700 MB/s.
How Summation Averaging Works in Practice
Summation averaging is a time-domain technique designed to filter out random, uncorrelated noise from repetitive signals. If the noise is random and the signal isn’t, averaging improves the SNR in direct proportion to the square root of the number of measurements.
Take a low-level 300 µV signal sampled at 125 MS/s by an M2p.5962 digitizer. In a single-shot acquisition, the signal is completely buried in random noise.
Average it just eight times, and you uncover the underlying structure revealing three distinct pulses occurring every 3.6 µs. Push that to 64 averages, and the signal clears up dramatically, exposing the main 300 µV pulse and its smaller trailing pulses.
In practical terms, running 64 averages nets you up to a 12 dB improvement in SNR, effectively adding about 2 bits of measurement resolution to the hardware’s baseline 16-bit performance.
Availability
The new firmware option (M2p.xxxx-spavg) is available immediately. It can be factory-installed on new 59xx series digitizers or flashed as a field upgrade for units already in the lab.
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