PXI Newsletter

Newsletter: High Speed PXIe Instruments			7/12/2010
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From Bob Helsel, Editor of the PXI Newsletter:

PXI System Alliance Links

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

PXI Express: A Natural Extension to PXI

Up to 2 GBytes/sec/direction dedicated bandwidth per slot
Up to 6 GBytes/sec/direction to the host
Up to 18 GBytes/sec/direction system bandwidth
Latency in the 100s of nanoseconds
Enhanced synchronization capabilities
- 100 MHz differential clock, differential triggering
Backwards compatibility
- Complete software compatibility
- Hybrid slot definition - install modules with
  either PCI or PCI Express signaling in a single slot

In the main article of this issue, High Speed PXIe Instruments, we overview how the increased performance of the PXI Express implementation and associated real-time storage systems allow the development of test systems that can aggregate the data streams from multiple instrument cards to a single recording system. In the PXI Express Specification Tutorial, we show how engineers and scientists can handle numerous demanding applications, such as high frequency and resolution IF/RF systems, high-speed digital interfaces, and imaging.

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Main Article

High Speed PXIe Instruments:

What to do with the potentially massive volume of high-speed data they produce.

By Ken Owens, Conduant Corp.

The PCI eXtensions for Instrumentation, or PXI bus, is firmly established in the world of test. Instrument manufacturers have exploited the PXI back-plane standard to create modular, configurable, high performance test systems. Numerous vendors now offer over 1,500 products that allow the test engineer to chose from a virtually unlimited combination of modules, accessories and software to quickly build highly optimized environments for each testing challenge. However with the growing success of PCI Express in compute intensive arenas such as display graphics and other bandwidth demanding applications, the standard is finding applicability in the test instrument domain.

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

PXI Tutorial

PXI Express Specification Tutorial

Introduction

The PXI industry standard has quickly gained adoption and grown in prevalence in test, measurement, and control systems since its release in 1998. PXI is being selected as the platform of choice for thousands of applications, from areas such as military and aerospace, consumer electronics, and communications, to process control and industrial automation. One of the key elements driving the rapid adoption of PXI is its use of PCI in the communication back-plane. Now, as the commercial PC industry drastically improves the available bus bandwidth by upgrading from PCI to PCI Express, PXI has the ability to meet even more application needs by integrating PCI Express into the PXI standard.