Express signalling accelerates PXI bandwidth

National Instruments has announced the industry's first PXI chassis and controllers based on PCI Express signalling, delivering up to 1Gbyte/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 ideal 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 Nystrom, Teamleader 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 1Gbyte/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 2.0GHz Intel Pentium M 760 processor and offers 250Mbyte/s per-slot dedicated bandwidth up to 1Gbyte/s of total system bandwidth.

Alternatively, engineers can use the MXI-Express for PXI 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 250Mbyte/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 2Gbyte/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 continue expanding to meet new high performance application needs", said Tim Dehne, NI Senior Vice President of R and 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.