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 work in product marketing at National Instruments and have spent 10 years in the test and measurement industry. Despite the perception that test is a slow moving industry, I have seen a lot change over this time in test technology and techniques and foresee more dramatic change in our industry over the next few years. I will use this forum to discuss these changes and their impact on test engineering. I will offer my own ideas and opinions based on interactions with test engineers around the world and, hopefully, I’ll also keep this discussion interesting by introducing some more controversial topics and opinions for debate!