National Instruments

To optimize the use of the Universal Serial Bus (USB) and deliver high-performance data acquisition, National Instruments created NI signal streaming technology. NI signal streaming combines three innovative hardware- and software-level design elements to enable sustained high-speed and bidirectional data streams over USB. The new technology helps engineers achieve high-performance applications on USB, which previously was possible only on an internal bus such as PCI. This white paper describes the challenges associated with high-speed data acquisition on USB and reasons why NI signal streaming technology is essential to any USB data acquisition (DAQ) device.