National Instruments GPIB-140A GPIB Extender

The NI GPIB-140A (Part Numbers: 777997-01, 777997-02, 777997-03, 777997-04, 777997-05, and 777997-06) is a GPIB Bus Extender. This device easily eradicates the cable length and device loading related restrictions which are compulsory by the IEEE 488 standard. The GPIB-140A is fully compatible with IEEE 488.1 and IEEE 488.2 standards. As per the IEEE 488 standard, the total length of any GPIB system cannot exceed 20 m. A pair of these GPIB Extenders can reach a total distance of 1 km without any modifications and without affecting the integrity of the user’s GPIB system.

This GPIB Extender can support up to 1 km fiber-optic cable. The NI GPIB-140A comes with a buffered transfer technique, making this model one of the quickest GPIB Bus Extenders available. With this model, the user can achieve faster than 2.8 Mbytes while operating in the HS488 protocol. This GPIB Extender can be deployed with minimal effort does not require additional hardware. In typical scenarios, a computer device is connected to a cable extender on one end. On the far end, a GPIB instrument is connected to a similar cable extender. Both cable extenders are then interconnected via a fiber-optic cable.

Each NI GPIB-140A continuously monitors GPIB activity and translates GPIB signals into parallel or serial signals for transmission to the receiving extender. The receiving extender receives serial or parallel signals from the transmitting extender and converts them to IEEE 488 signals. The NI GPIB-140A does not necessitate modification in existing software applications because it is software transparent.