PXI Express set to speed PXI market
By Richard A. Quinnell, Contributing Technical Editor -- Test & Measurement World, 6/1/2006 2:00:00 AM
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| Richard McDonell, PXI marketing group manager for National Instruments. Courtesy of National Instruments. |
National Instruments is recognized as a world leader in the development of PXI software and instrumentation. Recently, I called Richard McDonell, NI's PXI marketing group manager, to ask about the future of PXI.
Q: How is the PXI market doing?
A: PXI has been the fastest growing part of our business, at or above 40% annually, and market research firm Frost & Sullivan expects it to be the fastest growing segment of the test-and-measurement market for the next five years.
Q: But the PCI bus on which PXI is based is running out of steam in the face of today's gigahertz processors. What does that imp
ly for PXI?
A: The buzz today in the marketplace is PCI Express. It has pretty big shoes to fill if it is to replace PCI, which is still selling well and has a tremendous installed base. But PCI Express is exactly the bus that National Instruments has been looking for. The way PCI Express is architected it does a fantastic job of extending PCI. It can achieve 45 times the bandwidth of PCI and it provides dedicated bandwidth, not shared. That's up to 2 Gbps of dedicated bandwidth.
Q: What is the status of the PXI version of PCI Express?
A: The PXI Express specification was finalized in August 2005. We plan to introduce a PXI Express chassis and controller board this spring, and we know of at least half a dozen other vendors with PXI Express products in development. (Ed. note: See box, p. 54.) And it's important to note that PXI Express and PXI are completely hardware and software compatible so applications can move to PXI Express quickly.
Q: What other benefits besides greater bandwidth does PXI Express bring to the party?
A:Along with the increased capacity, there is better synchronization available. The bus offers a shared 100-MHz clock for synchronizing actions within the chassis. PXI had a 10-MHz clock, so this represents more precise timing.
Q: Are there applications that require the extra capabilities of PXI Express?
A: The market will be going after high-speed digital applications such as streaming video, machine vision, and semiconductor ATE. The extra capabilities of PXI Express allow creation of high-frequency, high-channel-count systems that are difficult to implement in PXI. Imagine being able to handle 60 channels of 100-MHz streaming video simultaneously or recording RF signals live to a RAID system—PXI Express can do it.
Q: Do you think PXI Express will spell the end of PXI?
A: It's very rare that one size fits all. We will need PXI Express for the highest bandwidth applications, but there are many things besides performance that will attract end users to PXI. These include its low cost, compact size, and design flexibility. Despite the fact that there are more than 1200 PXI products available today, more often the limitation of PXI is the lack of a particular PXI module and not performance of the PCI-based PXI backplane.
Thus, there is growing importance in PXI serving as the core of hybrid test systems and a growing opportunity for more vendors in the PXI marketplace. National Instruments, working with the PXI Systems Alliance, will continue extending PXI through research and by expanding its ability to meet new applications.
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