The MathWorks Announces Data Acquisition Tool for MATLAB

MathWorks, Inc. (Natick, MA) announced the upcoming release of the Data Acquisition Toolbox for use with MATLAB. This new toolbox bridges the gap between acquisition and analysis by providing direct access to live, measured data from MATLAB, the industry-standard technical computing and visualization environment. The toolbox provides a natural extension to MATLAB and offers engineers and scientists a single, integrated environment to support their entire analysis and development processes.

Scheduled for release later this spring, the Data Acquisition Toolbox provides a full set of functions for controlling and communicating with a variety of off-the-shelf, PC-compatible hardware. The Data Acquisition Toolbox is open and extensible, allowing users to easily customize their acquisitions, access the built-in features of external hardware devices, and incorporate the analysis and visualization features of MATLAB and its companion toolboxes into their designs.

Version 1.0 of the toolbox supports sound card devices as well as acquisition hardware from National Instruments Corp. and Hewlett-Packard. Vendors such as DSP Technologies, makers of SigLab, also provide third-party extensions to the toolbox.

"With the Data Acquisition Toolbox, MATLAB users and test and measurement engineers can take advantage of analysis tools that are more powerful than those currently available in stand alone, data acquisition software packages," said Jane Price, marketing manager of data acquisition products.

The Data Acquisition Toolbox offers a single, generalized interface to a variety of popular hardware devices. Because board vendors such as National Instruments and Hewlett-Packard have spent years developing the right set of features and attributes for each device, an important development objective for MathWorks was to take advantage of the features inherent in each board. The Data Acquisition Toolbox leverages the strengths of each device by exposing its hardware features through the MATLAB interface.

MathWorks, Inc. Vada Seccareccia 508/647-7572 vadas@mathworks.com

Sterling Hager, Inc. Susanna Hinds 617/926-6665 susanna@sterlinghager.com