Digital Signal Transceiver Driver Overview

Digital Signal Transceiver Driver (DST) is a software driver that enables an NI high-speed serial instrument with custom firmware to do one or both of the following:

  • Perform as a signal generation instrument that digitally transfers RF vector (I/Q) signals to a digital transmit-receive module (digital TRM), SDR, device with RFSoCs, or any device with an RF input/output and ADC/DAC.
  • Perform as a signal acquisition instrument that digitally transfers RF vector (I/Q) signals from a digital TRM, SDR, device with RFSoCs, or any device with an RF input/output and ADC/DAC.

Key Features

Digital Signal Transceiver Driver has the following features and capabilities:

  • Up to 4 GHz IBW[1]1 Assumes 32-bit I/Q, 5 GS/s for an aggregate throughput of 20 GB/s across all channels per direction (acquisition and generation). The design currently fails to meet timing with fractional resamplers enabled for 4 GHz images. (instantaneous bandwidth) of digital throughput
  • Multi-channel digital waveform acquisition and generation
  • Configurable I/Q records with reference triggering
  • Waveform generation with scripting from disk or onboard DRAM (dynamic random access memory)
  • Interfaces with NI-RFmx API (Analysis-Only Mode) for spectral, demodulation, or custom measurements
  • Real-time digital signal processing capability on the Tx and Rx paths, including fractional resampling, frequency shift, and others
  • Support for multiple devices in the DST Acquisition and DST Generation Add-Ons for InstrumentStudio

1 Assumes 32-bit I/Q, 5 GS/s for an aggregate throughput of 20 GB/s across all channels per direction (acquisition and generation). The design currently fails to meet timing with fractional resamplers enabled for 4 GHz images.