Patent ID: 7644207

Claim:
A data acquisition device comprising: a plurality of data acquisition channels; an isolated system management unit coupled to the data acquisition channels; a host system management unit coupled to a host communication channel; a serial bus coupled to the host system management unit and the isolated system management unit; isolation circuitry coupled to the serial bus, wherein the isolation circuitry is configured to electrically isolate the host system management unit from the isolated system management unit and the data acquisition channels; wherein the isolated system management unit and the host system management unit are each configured to store data associated with one or more pending bus transactions, wherein each of the system management units is further configured to select at least one of the pending bus transactions according to a predetermined priority based scheme, encode and serialize the data associated with the selected pending bus transaction, and transmit the serialized data across the isolation circuitry to the other system management unit via the serial bus; wherein the host system management unit is further configured to: implement a token based data control mechanism to control an amount of data that is streamed from the isolated system management unit; form a data request packet including a token count and stream identification information; and transmit the data request packet to the isolated system management unit via the serial bus.