A Historical Look at CDS Development

From a software perspective, integrators began to offer specific capabilities  

Despite these advancements in chromatographic data processing, peak detection and integration algorithms were crude, the user interface was cumbersome, and there was very little flexibility in the types of reports that these systems could generate. 

In the late 1970s, Hewlett-Packard introduced the HP-3300 series data-acquisition system, which was able to connect to 60 chromatographic instruments through an A/D converter. This was the beginning of what would become a revolution in CDS development within the analytical instrument industry. By the mid-1980s, all of the major analytical instrument manufacturers offered network-based data-acquisition systems Beckman, HP, PE, VG, and Waters. These were multi-user, time-sharing systems that used A/D converters to acquire data from the instruments. Instrument control, both HPLC and GC, was a capability that would soon follow. Several CDS manufacturers offered serial control of the HP 5890 GC while Waters also offered instrument control for their own HPLCs. 

For those scientists who had to perform quantitation, the linearity of the A/D was also critical. Linearity is the condition in which the detector s response is directly proportional to the concentration or amount of a component over a specified range of component concentrations or amounts. It is imperative that the A/D not add any additional error or variability to the performance of the detector. The resulting calibration curve now becomes dependent on the combined linearity of the detector and the /VD. Accurate quantitation requires that the system is linear over the range of actual sample concentrations or amounts. Many pharmaceutical assays, like degradation and stability studies, require that the system be able to identify and quantitate very disparate levels of peaks. In many cases, this translates into a 3 to 4 order of magnitude difference between the main active component and the impurities that need to be quantitated. 

Now that we have a method by which to accurately acquire a digitized representation of the chromatogram, the data system must identify the individual peaks and calculate their area or height. 

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