A PXI horse for the RF course
Rick Nelson, Chief Editor -- Test & Measurement World, 2/1/2006
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| The 3030A digitizer operates from 330 MHz to 3 GHz with a 33-MHz digitized bandwidth, while the companion 3035 operates to 6 GHz with a 36-MHz digitized bandwidth. Courtesy of Aeroflex. Tim Carey provides more details on PXI products, performance, cost, and hardware and software compatibility in the continuation of this interview. |
I spoke with Tim Carey, Aeroflex's product manager for PXI test systems, about PXI's applicability to RF applications.
Q What is Aeroflex's strategy with regard to software suites?
A Our software addresses gaps in the market. Development environments like LabView and LabWindows offer a wide variety of functions that can be applied to acquired data. But they don't address the needs of some of the 2G, 3G, and 4G communications standards that are fueling the demands for RF test equipment. So, we have developed measurement libraries that can be used in any development environments that support COM or ActiveX standards.
Q What prompted Aeroflex to look at PXI?
A. Our reasons were threefold. First, we needed a product architecture that was modular and reusable across Aeroflex. Having some core technology that is reusable throughout the company is paramount to improving time to market for new development. Second, we recognized that our customers' test-system development requirements would be similar to our own in that they need to accelerate time to market, which is best addressed by the flexibility and reuse of modular instrumentation. The final reason was cost. Test-system costs were escalating in line with the complexity of parametric test cases in design verification and production. We saw PXI as a good compromise for making very complex measurements at reasonable cost.
Q What are the prospects for PXI vs. LXI?
A Aeroflex supports the LXI standard, with LXI and PXI representing alternative approaches to the same problem. It's very much horses for courses.
Q Does the new PXI Express spec have ramifications for RF test?
A For any real-time measurement application where signal bandwidth is large or the event record is long, PXI Express will help accelerate test time. We are at the moment not able to stream our data in real time across the PXI backplane. With PXI Express, the possibilities for us to be able to communicate our full bandwidth data either in real time or near real time increase significantly. Now, we rely for real-time applications on our own LVDS front-panel interfaces, which provide the advantage of not being compromised by any Windows interrupts or backplane bottlenecks.
Q Are there any technical limits of the PXI platform that limit the maximum frequency at which PXI instruments can operate?
A No, nothing inherent in the PXI standard limits the frequency range. If you looked inside any of our other microwave instruments, they are to a larger or lesser extent modular. Nothing precludes that being engineered in PXI. It is the case that higher-frequency instruments tend to be heavier, usually because of the amount of RF screening. We did find in our initial development of RF modular instruments that being constrained to the 3U PXI form factor led to elegant and efficient designs.
Tim Carey provides more details on PXI products, performance, cost, and hardware and software compatibility in the continuation of this interview.
