Instrument bus standard announced
AXIe combines ATCA , PCIe, and LXI into a single platform.
Martin Rowe, Senior Technical Editor -- Test & Measurement World, 12/1/2009 2:00:00 AM
Aeroflex, Agilent Technologies, and Test Evolution have formed an alliance to develop and promote AXIe (AdvancedTCA Extensions for Instrumentation and Test), a new instrumentation bus standard designed for both general-purpose and semiconductor test. The new standard combines three existing computer buses—ATCA (Advanced Telecom Computing Architecture), PCIe (Peripheral Component Interconnect Express), and LXI (LAN eXtensions for Instrumentation)—into a single platform.
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The figure shows how instruments connect under the AXIe standard. An AXIe instrumentation chassis can hold 1 to 14 cards and uses Ethernet, PCIe, or both on its backplane for board communications. The AXIe 1.0 standard (Ref. 1) calls for both buses, but a chassis designer might choose only one. Instrument makers can design cards for either bus.
The slots in an AXIe chassis are large enough to hold ATCA cards, used in the telecom industry, which are larger than two 1U-sized PCIe or PXI cards. Adapter cards will hold one or two PCIe/PXI cards, adapting new or existing instrument cards to either backplane bus.
An AXIe chassis will also have cabled LAN and PCIe ports. The cabled PCIe bus in an AXIe chassis connects a host controller to a PCIe or PXI chassis. The LAN ports can connect the chassis to a host controller PC, which can also support external LAN-based LXI instruments.
Through an interface card, the host can also communicate with GPIB instruments, so you can protect your investment in those instruments if you decide to use AXIe. The AXIe standard will let you use your existing instrument drivers, be they PXI, LXI, or IVI (interchangeable virtual instrument). The instrument bus should be transparent to your application software.
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