New AXIe instrument standard emerges, but don't worry

MUNICH, GERMANY. Concurrent with the Productronica trade show, Aeroflex, Agilent Technologies, and Test Evolution proposed a new modular test standard, AXIe (AdvancedTCA Extensions for Instrumentation and Test). AXIe is an open standard based on AdvancedTCA (ATCA). AXIe proponents target the new standard at creating “a robust ecosystem of components, products, and systems for general-purpose instrumentation and semiconductor test.” AXIe, they say, leverages existing standards from ATCA, PXI, LXI, and IVI organizations. The new standard is intended to provide the scalability necessary to address a range of platforms, including general-purpose rack-and-stack instruments, modular instruments, semiconductor ATE systems, bench-top systems, and module plug-in systems.

“AXIe is the first modular standard that addresses rack-mounted systems by explicitly matching the orientation of a rack: horizontal. The simple genius behind this is that high performance instruments can be delivered on a large board size, but take up very little rack height. This is in sharp contrast to vertical-oriented systems where the rack height is fixed regardless of the number of modules. Of course, large ATE systems can use vertical AXIe configurations, making the standard extremely scalable,” said Larry Desjardin, GM for Agilent’s modular-product operation, in a press release.

What do you as an instrument user need to know about AXIe? Probably, not much. Unlike PXI and LXI, the new AXIe would appear to be transparent to users, other than providing what AXIe proponents call “higher performance per rack inch.” It’s the instrument designers who will need to master AXIe’s nuances.