PXI dominates at Autotestcon

PXI has largely replaced VXI in automated test systems.

Martin Rowe, Senior Technical Editor -- Test & Measurement World, 9/22/2011 11:47:35 AM

Automated test, particularly for military and aerospace, now relies heavily on PXI, which has largely replaced VXI in new test systems. This year’s IEEE Autotestcon show (September 12–15, Baltimore, MD) bore that out.

New I/O modules on display included two FPGA modules from Geotest: The GX3700 (PXI) and GX3700e (PXI Express). You can use the cards to develop your own custom digital circuits and interface them to other test-system components through serial data streams.

Pickering Interfaces expanded its line of PXI RF switches with the introduction of the 40-754, which can add up to 17 SPDT switches to a PXI chassis. The 40-754 is available in 500-MHz (one-slot) and 1.2-GHz (two-slot) versions.

ZTEC also introduced an RF product on a PXI module, the ZT8651 6-GHz vector signal analyzer. The new analyzer can demodulate WiFi and cellular protocols such as IEEE 802.11ae and LTE.

Agilent Technologies unveiled several additions to its PXI product line: a controller based on a 2.4-GHz processor, a 6.5-digit digital multimeter (the M9191A) that measures DC and AC current and voltage and two-wire and four-wire resistance, and new data-streaming capabilities for its M9392A PXI vector signal analyzer and M9202A digitizer that allow the modules to stream data to a RAID-based disc array.

Just prior to Autotestcon, National Instruments introduced the NI PXIe-6556 (a 200-MHz digital I/O module) as well as the NI PXIe-4140 and NI PXIe-4141 SMUs (source-measure units). Each of the SMUs provides four SMU channels, and you can combine modules to get up to 68 channels in a system with a 600-ksamples/s sample rate. The NI PXIe-4141 lets you tune the module’s output response to your load, which can improve stability over a fixed response time.