Welcome to the August 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.
Longevity and Success of the PXI Standard
Well accepted in diverse applications and industries for low-cost, modularity, ease of use, and performance.
The PXI specification is 13 years old.
From a single company in 1997 to over 55 companies in the PXISA, and over 1,500 products, PXI can address the most complex applications.
Frost & Sullivan (in Q4 2008) estimated a 17.6 % compound annual growth rate for PXI systems through 2014.
In the main article of this issue, PXImc Basics, we present a short tutorial on the essentials of the PXI MultiComputing (PXImc) standard that was released last Fall. In New PXI Products, we are showcasing PXI products recently released by members of the PXI Systems Alliance.
PXI MultiComputing (PXImc) is defined through the PXI-7, PXI MultiComputing Hardware Specification Rev. 1.0 and PXI-8, PXI MultiComputing Software Specification Rev. 1.0 released Sept. 16, 2009 by the PXI Systems Alliance. Using PXImc you can now connect multiple intelligent devices over cabled PCI Express. PXImc is completely compatible with PXI, and maintains backward compatibility with today’s PXI systems. It was developed to enable high-performance, multicontroller systems, and it is a vendor-interoperable standard.
As instrumentation systems continue to increase data collection capabilities, the need for increased processing power has grown. The PXISA has addressed moving this data from the instrument to the local processing element, but there are applications which require more processing power. There are also applications in which standalone instrumentation needs to have data offloaded for combining data with other systems or greater processing capability. But I/O interfaces, at the time, were not sufficient due to bandwidth or latency limitations. Examples of these types of systems would be remote processing of data acquired by instruments; or virtual instrumentation, where all control of the instrument is handled by a remote host PC; or distributed processing systems.
Thanks to all our readers.
Bob Helsel, Editor
www.pxisa.org
New PXI Products
The PXI platform continues its explosive growth with many new product introductions. New products for the month of August include
(listed alphabetically):
ADLINK PXI-2022
A simultaneous-sampling multi-function DAQ card
Geotest GX5295
100 MHz Digital I/O with PMU
NI PXIe-5630
National Instruments Announces Industry’s First PXI RF Vector Network Analyzer
OpenATE PEony-12 and Orchid-16
OpenATE Announces Flower Series Products to Provide IC Testing New Solutions
SP Devices TIGER Digitizer Family
New Digitizer Family from SP Devices
Virginia Panel i2™
i2™ – An Innovative Connector for the Test & Measurement Industry
