KineticSystems Profile
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Since 1970, KineticSystems has provided high-performance data acquisition products and services for a variety of applications, worldwide. Over the past
35 years, the company has built a reputation for superior quality and support of its products and customers. This capability was, in large part, due to KSC's philosophy of being a manufacturer, as well as, designer of its product lines. In today's environment of outsourcing, KSC believes this to be a significant competitive advantage.
In 1999, the company undertook an aggressive program to modernize its facilities and manufacturing capabilities. In order to keep pace with the fast-moving technology within the data acquisition industry and to ensure KSC's superior customer support, the company has invested nearly $1 million in plant and equipment.
KineticSystems Today
Our headquarters and factory facilities in Lockport, Illinois, have grown to 70,000 square feet. We also have 6 domestic sales offices, including the Lockport facility. We have distributors in 17 other countries. VXI and CAMAC continue to be our major product lines.
Today, an increasing number of customers are demanding the delivery of data acquisition and control solutions, not just products. For many years we have been providing software drivers for our products to make them easier to use. We have developed VXI plug&play instrument drivers for our wide range of VXI modules, and have a complimentary line of new PXI modules.
Our DAQ Director™ is prepackaged data acquisition software that runs under the popular Windows NT software operating system. It uses VXI hardware to acquire the data and powerful LabVIEW software to provide the operator interface and data analysis. There is absolutely no programming required for you to use a DAQ Director-based system as delivered. With the additional purchase of the full LabVIEW development package, you can create a custom system by using the graphical LabVIEW programming tools. Also, our programming staff can create a custom system for you. In addition to using LabVIEW, we can provide custom systems that use other applications such as LabWindows/CVI or Visual Basic for display and analysis.
KineticSystems is ideally suited to meet customers' needs as we enter the twenty-first century. We have over 35 years of experience in the design, manufacture and delivery of high-performance data acquisition products and systems. Even though the demand for standards-based products has only recently become a high priority, we have the experience with such products since 1970.
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A Major Producer of VXIbus Products and Systems
VXIbus is a standard (now IEEE STD 1155) developed by the major instrumentation manufacturers to allow customers to move from chassis-type instruments to computer-interfaced modular building blocks. In 1992 we embraced the relatively new VXIbus standard. Using our extensive CAMAC experience, we soon produced 35 VXI modules for data acquisition and control. As the VXI market has grown to several hundred million dollars, we continue our innovations with additional high-performance products. This includes the development of a set of products called the Grand Interconnect T. These products allow VXI chassis to be distributed on a fiber-optic highway. CAMAC and mixed VXI/CAMAC chassis are also supported. We are an active member of the VXI plug&play Systems Alliance, an organization that promotes standards that make VXI easier to configure and to use.
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The Leader in High-performance CAMAC-based Products
The company was founded in 1970 to develop and manufacture interface modules and associated products based on the international CAMAC standard. CAMAC, an acronym for Computer Automated Measurement and Control, is a set of specifications developed by a committee of the government-sponsored research laboratories (the NIM Committee) to provide standardized modular building blocks for configuring a wide range of data acquisition and control systems. CAMAC, the first open-system real-time input/output (I/O) specification, later was accepted as a standard by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE STD 583). We soon became the recognized leader in delivering high-performance CAMAC-based products. We have retained that leadership position.
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Innovation with the CAMAC Serial Highway
As the need for large distributed data acquisition and control systems grew, the NIM Committee produced specifications for the CAMAC Serial Highway to allow communication between a host computer and CAMAC I/O chassis over some distance. In 1975 we delivered the first CAMAC Serial Highway computer interface. We soon were recognized as the leader in the delivery of Serial Highway system components. This was followed by a number of Serial Highway innovations which included a block-mode protocol that increased data throughput by a factor of 10 and fiber-optic highway interfaces that allow the CAMAC chassis to be separated by up to 2 kilometers at full data rate. We continue to be an innovator in the field of high-performance data acquisition.
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