PXI turns 10
Richard A. Quinnell, Contributing Technical Editor -- Test & Measurement World, 5/1/2007
In recognition of the PXI standard’s 10th anniversary, I spoke with some of the industry’s pioneers. Included in the conference call were Loofie Gutterman, president of Geotest and current president of the PXI Systems Alliance (PXISA); Mike Dewey, senior marketing product manager at Geotest; Mark Wetzel, a National Instruments’ engineer and the PXISA Technical Chair; Spencer Stock, PXI product manager at NI; and Fred Bode, former executive director of PXISA.
Fred Bode, then director of the PXI Systems Alliance, and cohorts sign the papers giving birth to the PXI specification. Courtesy of the PXI Systems Alliance.
Q: What prompted creation of the PXI specification?
Bode: It started out at National Instruments. NI basically had the idea to improve on what was being done with VXI—but based on Compact-PCI—and then enlisted support from the test and measurement community.
Wetzel: Existing modular standards of the time were not meeting the cost and performance needs of customers. The PCI infrastructure offered lower cost and easier driver development, while the PCI bus itself offered four to eight times the performance of what was implemented earlier. The industry also needed a compact form factor.
Dewey: We had a substantial effort going into VXI at the time, but that spec was 10 years old and lagging in performance. PC-based instrumentation was not the way to go, partly because of I/O limitations. A modular approach offers 20 or 21 slots in a 19-in. rack. That’s a lot of I/O in a small space.
Gutterman: We had been looking for years for a PC-based platform for test, but while the PC had a good bus, its form factor was not right. In fact, what we needed were multiple form factors. VXI had multiple forms but they were not interoperable. PXI has both 3U and 6U sizes, and the boards are interoperable, so when we first saw PXI at Autotestcon in 1997, we said “Wow, this is what we are looking for.”
Q: Has the resulting specification met all of your expectations?
Bode: Early on, we had to overcome a reputation of PXI being less capable than other test approaches. There was some truth to that in the beginning, but fairly quickly, high-performance products came out and that went away.
Then, PXI began to penetrate a bunch of applications that didn’t have products to address their needs. Since then, there have been modifications such as the low-power mainframe that opened up additional applications, and now there is PXI Express. PXI has had a history of adopting forward-looking changes while staying backward compatible, allowing it to embrace newer applications.
Gutterman: The flexibility of the standard was something that no one really expected, but this ability to create major improvements while maintaining backward compatibility has been an important factor in PXI’s success. This success is demonstrated by the industry’s commitment to the platform. There are now 60 to 65 companies making products, with more than 1400 products out there and dozens of new products each month.
Stock: When you look at all the data, PXI has been a huge success. According to Frost & Sullivan, PXI sales worldwide are seeing a compound annual growth rate of 23%, dwarfing the rest of test and measurement, which is growing at about 5%.
Q: And the future for PXI?
Stock: PXI Express is going to allow developers to solve applications that no other technology can. They used to say that PXI didn’t have a history. Now, it is 10 years old and a proven solution. With PXI Express, the technology is on the forefront of test technology, and for some applications, it is the only off-the-shelf platform available.
