A DIO domain has one Master DIO board and up to seven DIO Slave boards. A DIO domain comprise of Master, its Slaves, Carriers and related modules. The figure below shows two domains from two different families on a PC bus.
Two Different DIO Domains on One PC Bus
Domains are internally synchronized and controlled through a Timing cable binding the Master’s Timing connector to all domain Slave boards. To synchronize a domain with a UUT, you need to synchronize the Master board’s Timing signals using the Master’s Timing connector.
Masters and slaves within a domain must be members of the same product family. Each Slave adds 32 additional UUT I/O channels. Up to seven slaves can be added to a domain.
Full domain containing eight DIO boards provide up to 256 UUT I/O channels (256 channels wide). Because the driver supports 16 masters, up to 16 domains of mixed types can, in principle, share a computer bus. The number of master/slaves depends on the DIO Bus type (ISA, PXI, PCI), and the number of available free bus slots in your system.