Skip Navigation Links | Home | Products | Digitizer Studio - Software For Control And Acquisition

Advanced yet user-friendly software for configuring, controlling, and analyzing data

User Guide

Main Product Image
 
 
 
 
​​​

​
Digitizer Studio is an advanced, yet user-friendly software tool for configuring, controlling, and analyzing data from the Teledyne SP Devices’ high-performance digitizers. It operates as a stand-alone measurement application that greatly simplifies hardware evaluation and speeds up system-level integration for embedded and OEM applications. It provides a rich graphical user interface (GUI) built on top of the digitizers’ application programming interface (API), allowing users to harness the full capabilities of the hardware without writing custom code. 

The primary goal of Digitizer Studio is to make high-speed data acquisition hardware immediately usable out-of-the-box. It functions both as a stand-alone measurement tool for lab work and as a companion for developers. This greatly simplifies hardware evaluation and accelerates development of end-user applications. By using Digitizer Studio to prototype and gather baseline results, OEM and system developers can separate digitizer control from their application logic, speeding up overall system integration. The tool is provided at no additional cost with the purchase of any supported Teledyne SP Devices digitizer – it is included in the SDK installer (for both Windows and Linux) alongside drivers, API libraries, and examples.


​

Digitizer Studio provides a comprehensive set of features for digitizer configuration, control, data acquisition, visualization, and analysis – all within a single GUI environment. Its core functionality can be grouped into two areas: configuration interface and measurement/analysis tools, with additional capabilities for data management.

Intuitive Hardware Configuration: The software presents an organized interface to configure the many settings of the ADQ series digitizers. Key elements of this interface include:​​​


​

Using these interfaces, a user can adjust any controllable hardware parameter on the supported digitizers – input channel setup (range, coupling, termination), sample clock source and rate, trigger modes, data recording length, firmware modes (e.g. normal acquisition vs. averaging mode), etc. Digitizer Studio essentially exposes the full programmability of the device through GUI controls. Notably, the GUI enforces valid configurations in real-time (thanks to the built-in parameter validation) and thus helps improve understanding and simplify usage of the digitizer, as the company described. In practice, this means new users can confidently explore device settings without fear of invalid combinations, and experienced users can more quickly spot configuration issues when the GUI flags them. 

​

Data Capture and Plotting

The software can initiate acquisitions from the digitizer (single-shot captures or continuous streaming, depending on device capabilities ). Captured waveforms from the digitizer’s ADC channels are plotted in real-time on the screen. Digitizer Studio supports multiple graph windows, so users can view data from different side by side. The plotting interface includes standard oscilloscope-like features: cursors and markers to measure time and amplitude differences, zoom and pan controls for inspecting details, and the ability to overlay or separate channel traces. For instance, a user can place cursors on the waveform to read timing between pulses or use a marker to get an exact amplitude value at a point. The GUI’s responsive plotting ensures even large waveform records (many millions of samples) can be navigated effectively.

Math and Signal Processing

Digitizer Studio provides a suite of built-in math operations and signal processing tools that can be applied to the acquired data on the fly. One prominent example is the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) function, which allows users to convert time-domain signals into frequency-domain spectra with a click. This is extremely useful for spectral analysis – users can immediately see the frequency content of a captured signal to identify tones, spurs or check noise floors. Other math features include waveform averaging (summing or averaging multiple acquisitions to improve signal-to-noise) and a record selector (to choose specific captured records or segments for analysis). These functions let users perform advanced evaluation of their signals directly within the tool, without exporting data to external programs. For example, one can capture a repetitive pulse waveform and apply an averaging function to reduce noise, then run an FFT to examine the frequency components – all inside Digitizer Studio.

Automated Measurements

To quantitatively assess performance, Digitizer Studio can compute common signal metrics automatically. The software includes measurement routines for Spurious-Free Dynamic Range (SFDR), Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR), Total Harmonic Distortion (THD), and other key parameters important in high-speed digitizer applications. These metrics are often used to characterize ADC performance. In Digitizer Studio, a user can enable these measurements and get instant readouts of values like SNR (in dB) or THD for the currently acquired waveform, rather than having to post-process the data elsewhere. This feature is very helpful to determine if the digitizer and signal chain are performing as expected at a system level. By providing these measurements, Digitizer Studio eliminates the need for writing custom analysis code or exporting data to tools like MATLAB for basic performance eval – one can validate the digitizer’s data quality in situ.

Data Storage and Export

Any acquired waveform data (raw or processed) can be saved to disk in a variety of formats directly from Digitizer Studio. Supported formats include common binary and ASCII types – for example, binary TDMS or proprietary formats for large data, CSV or TXT for smaller captures, MATLAB MAT files, etc. The tool permits saving entire acquisition records or just selected portions, as needed. It also allows exporting the current screen image or graph data for reporting purposes. The ability to save recorded data serves two main purposes:

Offline analysis - data can be later loaded into external analysis software or even re-loaded back into Digitizer Studio for further review. Indeed, Digitizer Studio can reopen saved waveform files and treat them as if they were just acquired, enabling users to revisit past experiments.

Application development – recorded data can act as a test input for developing custom software. For instance, a developer writing their own analysis program can use a dataset captured in Digitizer Studio as a known input for debugging algorithms. ​

​


​

Digitizer Studio serves as a comprehensive, cross-platform control and analysis software for Teledyne SP Devices’ range of digitizers. It provides an easy on-ramp for users to unlock the full performance of high-speed data converters through an interactive GUI, without immediate resort to programming. With features like Diagram View and Table View for intuitive configuration, and built-in FFT and metric calculations for signal analysis, it effectively bridges the gap between hardware and user, catering to both laboratory experimentation and preliminary system development. The software supports all major ADQ-series digitizer models – from multi-channel PXIe cards to stand-alone USB units – and runs on both Windows and Linux PCs for flexible deployment. By leveraging the underlying C/C++ API and ensuring parity between GUI controls and low-level functions, Digitizer Studio also doubles as a teaching tool for the API and a speedy evaluator for new setups.

​​In practice, users praise Digitizer Studio for significantly reducing setup time and errors: the real-time validation and visual feedback give confidence that the digitizer is configured correctly, while the immediate plotting and measurements let one verify signals and performance on the fly. It effectively turns a PC and digitizer into a high-performance oscilloscope or spectrum analyzer tailored to the specific hardware. At the same time, it remains extensible and non-restrictive – when applications demand custom integration or long-term data recording, the transition to using the provided SDK is smooth, with Digitizer Studio’s saved configurations and observed results guiding the development process.


​​
Teledyne SP Devices offers cutting-edge hardware and software solutions for original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), accelerating product development and reducing costs for our customer​​​. 
  • Software application development
  • FPGA firmware development
  • Modification of existing digitizer platforms
  • Full-custom development of test & measurement equi​pment

​ Explore Our OEM Solutions​​​​​

​Benefits

  • Evaluate digitizer performance quickly and easily
  • Use as a stand-alone measurement software and/or as an evaluation tool during system-level integration
  • Get acquainted with the underlying hardware and learn parameter interdependencies and valid settings
  • Utilize powerful and easy-to-use configuration capabilities to setup individual or multiple boards
  • Save and restore configurations
  • Capture, plot, and analyze data and save/restore the results

Applications

  • OEM/embedded system-level integration
  • General test and measurement
  • Digitizer performance evaluation

Requirements

  • Selected digitizers only. Please refer to the datasheet for a list of supported models.
  • Both Windows and Linux supported. Please refer to the datasheet for a list of supported revisions and distributions.
  • For requests about additional distributions and/or extended operating system support please contact your local sales representative

Deliverables