National Instruments is now offering the industry's first PXI chassis and controllers based on PCI Express signalling, delivering up to 1 GB/s per-slot dedicated bandwidth. Engineers can use the new PXI Express chassis and controllers to improve performance for PXI systems and integrate high-bandwidth PXI Express modules as they become available. The new chassis and controllers add capabilities from the latest PXI Specification, which defines PXI Express to increase PXI bandwidth by 45 times, to integrate the industry's best timing and synchronisation and to preserve compatibility with existing software and more than 1000 PXI modules. By increasing throughput and improving measurement accuracy, the new chassis and controllers are suitable for high-channel-count, high-throughput or multimodule applications, such as IF streaming, mixed-signal or image acquisition.
"To provide cost-effective test solutions, Flextronics has standardised on the PXI test platform," said Hans Nyström, team leader of test and verification for Flextronics Design. "In the telecom industry, PCI Express is rapidly becoming a standard interface. In order to provide matching performance, the PCI Express technology in the PXI platform is the natural way to solve the continuously increasing bandwidth applications in this domain."
The NI PXIe-1062Q eight-slot chassis offers up to 1 GB/s per-slot dedicated bandwidth and a mix of PXI and PXI Express slots, similar to modern PCs, which provide both PCI and PCI Express slots. The chassis includes a PXI Express system slot, a PXI Express slot with system timing capabilities and four PXI peripheral slots. Furthermore, the chassis provides two PXI Express hybrid slots that accept both PXI and PXI Express modules. The two hybrid and four PXI peripheral slots provide six available slots that work with any of the more than 1000 existing PXI modules available on the market.
The NI PXIe-8103 embedded controller includes a 2,0 GHz Intel Pentium M 760 processor and offers 250 MB/s per-slot dedicated bandwidth up to 1 GB/s of total system bandwidth. Alternatively, engineers can use the MXI-Express controllers, the NI PXIe-PCIe836x and the NI PXIe-ExpressCard8360, for desktop PC and laptop computer control of PXI Express systems with up to 250 MB/s of cabled system bandwidth. PXI Express chassis and controllers available later in 2006 will provide even higher bandwidth capabilities because the PXI Express specification allows for up to 2 GB/s per-slot dedicated bandwidth.
In addition to hardware compatibility, PXI Express products provide backward compatibility with software written for existing PXI systems. PCI Express, through the PCI Special Interest Group (PCI-SIG), guarantees this compatibility at the low-level bus to ensure that engineers do not need to make any software changes to existing systems to use the new products.
"With PXI Express, the PXI platform can now solve more high-performance applications," said Tim Dehne, NI senior vice president of R&D. "PXI Express offers the industry's best bandwidth and lowest latency with complete software compatibility."
The new PXI chassis and controllers work with all existing PXI modules and software. Engineers can use existing code written for the NI LabVIEW graphical development platform, NI LabWindows/CVI ANSI C development environment and NI Measurement Studio for Microsoft Visual Studio code with these new products.
About PXI
PCI eXtensions for Instrumentation (PXI) is an open specification governed by the PXI Systems Alliance ( www.pxisa.org) that defines a rugged, CompactPCI-based platform optimised for test, measurement and control. It is supported by more than 70 member companies and more than 1150 products are available. PXI products are compatible with the CompactPCI and CompactPCI Express industrial computer standards and offer additional features such as environmental specifications, standardised software and built-in timing and synchronisation.
About National Instruments
For 30 years, National Instruments ( www.ni.com) has been a technology pioneer and leader in virtual instrumentation - a concept that has changed the way engineers and scientists in industry, government and academia approach measurement and automation. Using PCs and commercial technologies, virtual instrumentation increases productivity and lowers costs for test, control and design applications through easy-to-integrate software, such as NI LabVIEW, and modular measurement and control hardware for PXI, PCI, PCI Express, USB and Ethernet.
For more information contact Michael Hutton, National Instruments SA, 0800 203 199.
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