Computer Standards & Interfaces 14 (1992) 333-337 333 North-Holland Commentary Toward a standardized data acquisition interface Tarik Ozkul Computer Engineering Department, King Fahd University of Petroleums and Mineral, KFUPM Box 1912, Dhahran 31261, Saudi Arabia Abstract Ozkul, T., Toward a standardized data acquisition Interface, Computer Standards & Interfaces 14 (1992) 333-337. Personel computers increasingly have more acceptance as serious data acquisition tools in the lab environments. But the lack of standardization in this field is becoming a serious setback for the personal computer to be more popular. In this paper several important points that should be considered in a data acquisition interface are discussed and a trial standard that is being implemented in KFUPM is examined. Keywords: Data acquisition; standards. I. Introduction Personal computers are becoming more popu- lar as data acquisition tools in research labs and industrial environment. The two major underlying factors behind this are the increase of the reliabil- ity, and the increase of the processing power of the PCs. Personal computers which are initially designed for the office environment are now be- ing manufactured in industrial grade - called industrial PCs - which are robust enough to take the vigors of the harsh factory environment. With respect to the processing power of PCs we have come a long way from the first PCs that were introduced in the beginning of the 1980s. After a decade, the ordinary PC now has the power of yesterday's workstation at a fraction of the cost. Besides the two major factors stated above there are other factors such as abundant availability of software packages and software tools for the PCs which are additional incentives for using PCs in the industrial environment. Manufacturers of data acquisition instruments were quick enough to take notice of the develop- ment and respond to it by designing various dif- ferent add-in cards designed to be used with the PC. Soon after the development of the cards, software companies prepared commercial soft- ware packages for controlling data acquisition cards. Encouraged by the response that they got, hardware companies continued on designing sys- tems with more sensitive, higher resolution data acquisition equipment. As the PC-based data ac- quisition got more acceptance from industry we see the merger from the add-in cards concept to a more acceptable architecture where the data acquisition hardware is located inside a crate and the crate is controlled by the PC. This architec- ture offers higher sensitivity since data acquisi- tion equipment is taken out of the electromagnet- ically noisy PC environment. The last evolution in this arena was the development of hybrid systems with intelligent crates and the necessary data acquisition hardware built in. Because of the in- 0920-5489/92/$05.00 © 1992 - Elsevier Science Publishers B.V. All rights reserved