I came across an interesting blog post by Richard A. Quinnell, Technical Editor — Test & Measurement World. In his blog, he made the following statement, “With just about everything going wireless, I’ve started wondering when PXI will join the parade.” I felt a response by our PXI Marketing Group Manager, Richard McDonell would be appropriate.
Guest Blogger: Richard McDonell – PXI Group Manager
Every day I learn about another common device that has gone wireless…from cell phones to game controllers to PCs and laptops. In each of these cases, the wireless interface is replacing a previously wired solution providing increased range, improved flexibility, and added user-convenience. These are great benefits, so why hasn’t PXI gone wireless? Well, in many ways it already has. PXI is already being used to design and test thousands of wireless devices and you can use a wireless (802.11) LAN interface to transfer data to other systems or back to a network location. Wireless LAN interfaces can also be used for controlling your PXI systems remotely.
So why not decouple each PXI module from a wired PXI bus and connect them using a wireless protocol? Technically, there is no reason why you couldn’t do this. The real question is do you really want to? Unfortunately, the convenience of a wireless interface doesn’t come without tradeoffs in performance, setup ease-of-use, and cost. The core benefits of PXI come from the shared card cage architecture, the high bandwidth and low latency PCI and PCI Express bus, and integrated timing and synchronization (I suppose this could also count as “wireless” since PXI eliminates the need for most external trigger and synchronization cables). Separating each PXI module into its own separate sub-system via WiFi would dilute the benefits of PXI and significantly decrease the performance (due to increased bus latency), cost (due to dedicated fans, power supplies, and boxes per device), and synchronized measurement accuracy (due to a lack of triggering) that PXI offers in its current state compared to traditional standalone instrumentation. You would however retain the user-defined software aspects of PXI in such a configuration which is a key component of PXI’s measurement flexibility and reuse.
Thus, I do not feel wireless PXI in the form of discrete PXI devices connected via wireless interface is worth the effort. However, I would agree PXI is the ideal platform for designing and testing wireless devices and that it enables higher performance, lower cost, and improved flexibility in most test and control applications today.