Corporate Timeline

1998

• The culmination of several years of development effort takes place with the introduction of the firm’s first PCI-bus cards: the PowerDAQ Series. Based on a Motorola DSP chip to offload the host CPU, they achieve performance unheard of at the time.

1997

• In recognition of the need for an entry-level board, UEI develops and markets the Win-10 Series of cards, which although sold at a budget price spec a throughput of 400 kHz.

1996

• After examining various data-acquisition boards from many manufacturers for the best performance at the best price, Analog Devices Inc selects UEI’s Win Series in a multi-year reseller agreement.

1994

• Keeping pace with the industry trend towards realtime operating environments as an alternative to Windows, UEI ships its WIN-30 drivers for the QNX realtime OS.
• In further refining its hardware, UEI expands the WIN-30 line with:
  • 1-MHz simultaneous sampling cards that allow users to set different gains on each input
  • An improved analog front end so users can work with as many of the channels on multichannel board as they like without total system throughput dropping
  • Released a scheme that allows continuous streaming to disk of data being digitized at 1 MHz. The 1-MHz streaming product is so impressive that Xerox selects it for use in its RGB color scanners.

1993

• The firm relinquishes its role as a distributor and instead decides to start manufacturing its own boards.
• Already at this time showing glimpses of its technical leadership, UEI designs and ships the industry’s first 1-MHz board for Windows 3.1, the WIN-30 Series.
• That line proves quite successful; indeed, TRW Corp becomes one of the first OEMs for that product when it selects the WIN-30 as the basis for the test stands that verify the quality of its automotive airbags.

1990

• The company is founded in 1990 as a distributor of ISA-based data-acquisition boards, selling them directly as well as through major catalog resellers.