Gage Applied Technologies has introduced optional on-board Signal Averaging FPGA Technology in its high-resolution digitizers. Allows users to detect very small signals in noisy environments.

Signal Averaging capability takes advantage of the on-board FPGA technology on select Gage 12 and 14-bit digitizers and allows rapid signal averaging with no CPU-loading on the host PC. The process consists of making multiple acquisitions of a repetitive waveform and averaging all acquisitions together. Any random noise is subsequently averaged to near zero, while the amplitude of the underlying repetitive signal remains unchanged.

Since the signal averaging is performed on-board using the intelligent processing of the FPGA, the amount of data that needs to be transferred via the PCI bus to the PC may be reduced by a factor of 1000. In fact, waveforms can be signal-averaged at a rate of greater than 100,000 waveforms/sec. or a data processing rate of 800 MB/s.

Signal averaging improves the fidelity of noisy repetitive signals. Small signals can be extracted from a background of high amplitude noise, which may even be larger than the actual signal itself. Applications include: ultrasonic, radar or lidar testing, optical fiber testing, stimulus-response systems and network analysis.

Gage Applied Technologies, gage-applied.com