PXI Newsletter

Newsletter: Supporting Serial Bus Interfaces with PXI Digital Instrumentation			3/24/2010
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From Mike Dewey, PXISA Marketing Committee member:

PXI System Alliance Links

Welcome to the March 2010 edition of the PXI Newsletter. Our intent is to educate and inform you the reader about how the PXI standard is being used in modular test systems for a wide variety of industries.

The March issue marks the 7th edition for this newsletter. In reviewing the past issues, one will find a broad range of applications and markets being addressed by PXI systems and instrumentation. This breadth of capabilities and served markets is what continues to drive PXI’s market growth. In past issues, we have noted that by the end of 2009, Frost and Sullivan predicted that there would be over 100,000 deployed PXI systems which is a testament to the broad acceptance of the PXI platform. Additionally, the PXISA continues to add new members worldwide which further reinforce the popularity and acceptance of the standard as a mainstream test and measurement platform.

Today, we have 60 members producing a wide variety of products including components, instruments and systems – with the common thread being their use in PXI instruments and systems worldwide. With this broad-based membership, the PXI platform is positioned well for continued growth and deployment for a broad range of applications.

In this issue, we offer two articles on PXI. The first focuses on how a general purpose PXI digital instrument can be used to support a variety of popular serial interfaces. The second discusses the many advantages of a PXI modular platform including flexibility, reduced size and weight, reduced cabling and interconnections and often enhanced timing and synchronization. We hope you enjoy this month’s newsletter.

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Main Article

Supporting Serial Bus Interfaces with PXI
Digital Instrumentation

Introduction:
As the electronics industry has evolved, so too have the number of methods for transferring information between electronic components and subassemblies. Today there are many protocols and methods for communicating between components, circuit boards, subsystems, LRUs and systems. While system level communication has seen a variety of both parallel and serial communication standards evolve; board-level, and especially component level communication has primarily adopted serial data transfer methods. Using a generic digital test instrument with sufficient flexibility and control can provide the needed functionality to emulate and control common serial bus protocols. This paper reviews three serial bus protocols, the Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI) bus, the Inter-Integrated Circuit bus (I²C) bus and a JTAG bus, and discusses how one might use a general-purpose PXI digital instrument to emulate these busses.

SPI Bus
One of the simplest serial bus protocols is the Serial Peripheral Interface bus, or SPI Bus. The SPI bus is a synchronous serial data transfer standard popularized by Motorola. Devices on the SPI bus transfer information in a full duplex mode and communicate in a master/slave configuration, where the master initiates the data transfer between itself and one or multiple slaves.

Thanks to all our readers.
Bob Helsel, Editor
www.pxisa.org

Application Article

PXI offers State-of-the-Art
in Modular Platforms

PXI is one of the most successful modular test and measurement platforms. Modular platforms offer many advantages including flexibility, reduced size and weight, reduced cabling and interconnections and often enhanced timing and synchronization. For complex systems including multi-channel applications, modular platforms offer significantly lower price and lower total cost of ownership than the equivalent in stand-alone instrumentation. As seen in recent PXI newsletter articles, the range of products and performance in PXI is truly amazing, from microwave frequencies to Terabytes of storage to almost limitless channels of signal switching and data acquisition, all supported by powerful software and computing. One of the key benefits is the capability to combine signal switching and switch matrix functionality along with test and measurement instrumentation in a single chassis.