Highlights

Agilent Technologies has agreed to acquire Acqiris, a maker of high-speed digitizer cards for the PCI, CompactPCI, and PXI buses. The product line also includes analyzer cards that contain onboard digital signal processors (DSPs) and multichannel instruments made up of the company’s cards. The acquisition marks Agilent’s first presence in the digitizer card market since the company divested its line of VXI instruments in 2003. It’s also the first time in the PXI market in any way for that long-time maker of stand-alone box instruments. www.agilent.com.

Keithley Instruments, renowned for its bench instruments, recently entered the PXI market with the introduction of a broad line of PXI instrument cards, chassis, controllers, and accessories. The company has introduced eight models of multifunction data-acquisition cards (KPXI-DAQ series), two multifunction cards (KPXI-SDAQ), two analog output cards (KPXI-AO), four digital I/O cards (KPXI-DIO), and a two-channel digitizer (KPXI-AI-2-65M).

The new PXI line also includes two extension interface cards, one of which extends a PXI system by connecting to other PXI chassis. The second interface card lets you control a PXI chassis from a PC through its PCI bus. www.keithley.com.

The PXI Systems Alliance and Geotest–Marvin Test Systems have produced a Webcast entitled, “Using PXI Digital Test Instrumentation for Video Test Applications.” First aired on December 6, the Webcast is still available on the PXISA Web site.

The Webcast, presented by Dale Johnson, Geotest’s customer technical support manager, provides an overview of PXI digital test instrumentation architectures that can be employed for a range of high-performance digital stimulus/response applications including video record/playback. Included is a discussion of how a PXI-based test solution can be used to address a video-test application. www.pxisa.org.

Huntron has announced that it has established an authorized integrator program for its TrackerPXI and Access Robotic Probing Station systems. It has signed on Advint (Columbus, OH), Custom Systems Integration (Endicott, NY), and Larson Automation (Fremont, CA). TrackerPXI employs signature-analysis techniques to add component-level diagnostics to existing PXI test platforms. The Access probing stations provide 20-micron accuracy to provide reliable probing of small surface-mount components.

“Huntron traditionally has been involved in stand-alone test solutions; however, our customers are driving us to integrate our TrackerPXI and Access Robotic Probing Station as a complementary diagnostic tool for a wide variety of automatic test equipment. We always try and provide our customers with the most cost-effective solutions, and historically Huntron has very little experience with integration. We thought the best solution for us to support customers was to align our products with industry leaders in the design, development, integration, test, and support of automatic test systems,” said Bill Curry, Huntron president. www.huntron.com.