The Automated Test Blog

PXI is celebrating its 10 year anniversary in 2007. Richard Quinnell at Test and Measurement World recently wrote about PXI’s anniversary, highlighting the compatibility it has achieved during this time. For me, its been remarkable to see the growth and changes in this marketplace over the past 10 years, especially all the times that PXI vendors achieved “the impossible”. Here are a few of my favorites:

• 1999 – 50 members and over 200 products. The first few years of the standard saw a rapid adoption by vendors and the release of a lot of products. Grow exceeded expectations in every dimension.
• 2002-PXI’s entry ito RF. Prior to the release of products by National Instruments and Aeroflex, certain vendors had been outspoken that “you could never do RF in PXI”. Last year, Phase Matrix announced that they are taking PXI all the way up to 26.5 GHz!
• 2003 – PXI systems shipments exceed VXI. By 2006, PXI vendors shipped over 10,000 systems per year – 3 times larger than VXI at its peak. Naysayers claimed modular systems would never be mainstream.
• 2004- A 512 Cross-Point Switch. With the release of the PXI-2532, National Instuments put to rest those that claimed the Achilles heal of PXI was switch density.
• 2005-PXI Express. The PXI Systems Alliance did a remarkable job incorporating new technology to achieve a 45-fold increase in bandwidth while preserving backward compatibility. Those that claimed PCI Express would break compatibility become suddenly quiet.
• 2007 – Agilent joins the PXISA. Agilent Technolgies joined other big name vendors such as Advantest, Aeroflex, Keithley, National Instruments, Rohde & Schwarz, and Teradyne. So much for not having any big name companies in PXI!

I just saw another example of what we call a VBA, a “van-based acquisition”. It turns out that in RF applications, virtual instrumentation is particularly common when customers need portability and real-time data streaming. There aren’t a lot of commercial products to solve this application, but a PXI-based system can handle most of these requirements at a very low cost. Here is the latest example I just received of a VBA:

“The customer was looking for a completely mobile RF spectral monitoring application. They want to have a DC-based system mounted in their vehicles and they want to drive through areas and monitor a band of secure radio channels and signal strengths for those channels. The main requirements of the system are portability, quick spectral acquisition and storage (stream-to-disk) and time/location stamping for each spectral sweep.

This is a unique application that requires a small form-factor, stream-to-disk capabilities and GPS stamping. It can solved today with commercial off the shelf PXI products”

Other PXI-based VBAs are deployed in military applications (either looking for “signals of interest” or jamming them), ground-based transceiver testers, commercial spectral monitoring systems, and cell-phone coverage mapping applications.