Development Of USB Bus Based Data Acquisition And Control Interface For Full-auto Patch-Clamp Systems

The patch clamp technique has become the main method for the molecule and cell researching. The data acquisition and control interface in the electronic components, which is one of the parts of the patch-clamp system, realizes the communication between the data and the control commands by connecting the front of the patch-clamp system and the computer system. A new type data acquisition and control interface based on the USB technology is discussed in this thesis. It can substitute the traditional ISA card or PCI card and has a lot of advantages, such as high speed, plug and play(PnP), field install, convenient update, non-occupying any computer resources and auto-control etc. It is an ideal bus technology for data acquisition and control interface applied into the new generation patch clamp system.The design of the hardware, the software and the system architecture of the data acquisition and control interface based on the USB bus technology, which is applied into the full-auto patch clamp system, is discussed in detail in this thesis. After describing the constitutes and design plans of each part, more attention is put on the design methods and the technique details of the hardware, the software and the architecture. Much work has been done to optimize the hardware and the software design in order to realize the high-speed transmission to get the most use of the system bandwidth and use the intelligent software method instead of the usual man work.