Teledyne SP Devices has announced high-speed data acquisition through the combined capabilities of its ADQ35 data acquisition board family and the libads NVMe streaming library. These technologies enable sustained multi-tens-of-gigabytes-per-second disk write performance, supporting long-duration data acquisition and recording for applications such as wideband signal collection, radar analysis, satellite monitoring, and scientific instrumentation.
Modern data acquisition systems generate large volumes of high-fidelity data. File-system-based storage methods introduce latency, limit throughput, and cannot maintain continuous recording at full digitizer speed. Teledyne SP Devices developed libads, an NVMe streaming library that performs direct block-level writes to SSD arrays. By bypassing the operating system, libads removes bottlenecks and supports sustained performance for high-speed data capture when used with the ADQ35 digitizer.
High-performance disk streaming depends on efficient data movement from digitizer to storage. The ADQ35 operates at up to 10 GSPS in single-channel mode or 5 GSPS in dual-channel mode, generating 20 GB/s of raw data. Its PCIe Gen3 interface supports up to 14 GB/s host transfer bandwidth per device. A host PC requires PCIe Gen4 or Gen5 x16 slots to support digitizers, GPUs, and NVMe carrier boards. PCIe bifurcation or switches can be used to connect multiple NVMe drives in parallel. RAID arrays can be built using enterprise-class NVMe SSDs such as the Kioxia CD8 for sustained write performance, or consumer SSDs for burst recording. Writing directly to disk sectors reduces overhead and increases throughput.
libads manages direct data streaming from the ADQ35 to NVMe drives using large, contiguous block writes. This enables sustained write rates exceeding 25 GB/s in RAID configurations while maintaining performance with minimal jitter. The library scales from compact systems to large RAID arrays and keeps CPU overhead low, allowing the host processor to focus on supervision or real-time processing, including GPU-accelerated workflows.
Enterprise RAID systems built from five SSDs, such as Kioxia CD8 drives, can deliver sustained write speeds of 25 GB/s or more with capacities around 75 TB, supporting multi-hour recordings at full digitizer speed. Configurations using consumer NVMe drives, such as Kingston Fury Renegade G5, provide high burst write speeds for shorter recordings. Performance may reduce once SLC cache is exhausted.
Maximum throughput depends on factors including PCIe lane allocation, block transfer sizes, SSD endurance and sustained performance, and thermal management to prevent throttling during long-duration recording.
Click here to learn more about the ADQ35.
Click here to learn more about the Disk streaming solutions with libads.
