USB based high speed data acquisition system

Present day long format sensors generate a large volume of data thus demanding high-speed data acquisition systems, processing and real-time image display. USB owing to it's features like high data transmission, plug and play, hot plugging, portability, simple interface etc. is best suited for such applications with minimum power and real estate. An attempt is made to design USB based PC peripheral for data acquisition systems/ PC peripheral thus eliminating bulky conventional data acquisitions systems and to design USB (FT2232H) based data acquisition (DAQ) system. Analog front-end device (AFE) with 16-bit ADC is used to quantify analog to 16-bit digital data at 10MSps. `LabVIEW' is a graphical programming environment used for real-time data acquisition, processing and display. This paper summarizes details on design aspects of DAQ system and test results. The developed hardware is low cost, portable, miniaturized, and reliable even at high speeds thus giving an edge over contemporary bulky DAQ systems.