LXI instrument classes and applications
By Rick Nelson, Editor in Chief -- Test & Measurement World, 11/1/2008 2:00:00 AM
Since December 2005, the LXI Consortium has acquired 52 member companies, 16 of whom are instrument vendors who have released 525 LXI-compatible instruments, reported Conrad Proft, a technology product planner/applications engineer at Agilent Technologies, during a September 10 Autotestcon presentation titled “Test Applications Using LXI Instruments.” During the presentation, presented in Webcast format on September 24 in conjunction with Test & Measurement World, Proft and his co-presenters reviewed LXI basics, described how to put an LXI system together, and explained the three LXI instrument classes while highlighting potential applications for each.
 LXI instruments can exist on an isolated subnet yet communicate with other instruments around the world. |
Class C instruments represent the base class, incorporating such features as a Web browser and IVI (interchangeable virtual instrument) driver API (application programming interface), Proft said, noting that Class B instruments add synchronization capability via the IEEE 1588 precision time protocol and support peer-to-peer messaging. Class A instruments, he said, add a fast hardware trigger bus. Proft noted that LXI-based systems require only one Ethernet cable per 19-in. rack and therefore support much higher instrument densities than does GPIB.
Proft’s co-presenters were Rob Purser, the senior team lead for connectivity products at The MathWorks (Purser also leads the Multi Vendor System Demo group for the LXI Consortium); Brian Powell, software principal architect in LabView R&D at National Instruments; and Tom Sarfi, functional-test business unit manager for VXI Technology. In the archived Webcast of the presentation (www.tmworld.com/webcasts), Proft explains how to set up LXI instruments on an isolated subnet (figure), Purser describes a 1588 time-synchronization demonstration and a far-field antenna measurement demonstration presented at Autotestcon, Powell comments on LXI software compatibility, and Sarfi describes a distributed application that employed Class A instruments to support more than 10,000 channels of strain-measurement data acquisition.
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