PCI-5105 and automatic pretrigger rearming

[JSnyder]

Hello,
 
I am working on a project with the following data acquisition specifications:
 
1.) 10 MSamples/sec/channel on 4-5 channels.
2.) Acquisition of at least 5k events/sec/channel where an event is an analog pulse 10 microseconds in durations.  The events are randomly spaced.
3.) Acquistion of the complete event shape for area under the curve measurements.
4.) LabVIEW as the programming language.
5.) DAQ board resides in a Windows PC (1.79 GHz Pentium, 1 GByte of RAM).
 
I have recommended the NI PCI-5105 (the 16 MByte onboard memory version) to fill these requirements.  What I would like to do with this card is to set it up to acquire the pulses in pretriggered mode and have the board automatically rearm itself after each event acquistion (no software rearming).  I would then analyze the peaks in software for peak height and area.
 
Will this board do the above?  Am I going to run into bandwidth problems when trying to retrieve the data from the board?  The total throughput should be (10 MSamples/sec/channel * 5000 events/sec * 10 microseconds/event * 5 channels) = 2.5 MSamples/sec.
 
Any advice or recommendations would be greatly apreciated.
 
-John 

[JSnyder]

Hi Matthew,
 
thanks for the info. 
 
>  What do you plan on triggering from?
 
We are going to be triggering on the analog signal on one of the channels.  This is a flow cytometry project which involves detecting cells as they pass through a number of laser beams seperated in space.  The interaction between the lasers and the cell (fluorescence or scattering) is detected by a series of PMTs.  So, the cell crossing the first beam/PMT pair would serve as the trigger and events will be seen on subsequent PMTs at times after the trigger as the cell flows through the cytometer.
 
> 3. By the complete event shape you mean the entire waveform?
 
Yes.  We need the complete waveform of the triggering event as well as subsequent events seen on other channels.
 
> The board with 16MB of onboard memory can acquire 6202 samples to the onboard memory. This calculation can be found on page 15 of the manual.
 
I'm not quite sure how you are getting 6202 from this equation.  By my calculations, 6202 samples * 2 bytes/sample * 1 MB/1048576 bytes = 0.0119 MB.  From my throughput calculation before, I will be putting 2.5 MSamples/sec into the onboard memory, which is (2.5 MSamples/sec * 2 bytes/sample *1 MB/1048576 bytes) =~ 4.8 MB/sec.  So I should be in good shape if I fetch data from the board ever 0.2 seconds or so.
 
Thanks again for the info... I didn't realize that the 60 MS/s was divided amongst all the channels.
 
-John