Agilent’s AXIe/PXI modular instrumentation family

Agilent’s AXIe/PXI modular instrumentation family

The idea for a new product can come from many places. Sometimes it comes from an engineer tinkering in the lab with some new components. Or it may come from a sudden, late-night bolt of inspiration. Or it may come from the need to customize a product for a particular user’s application. In the case of Agilent Technologies’ AXIe/PXI modular instrumentation family, it came from a survey.

In 2009, Agilent commissioned a third party to conduct an independent survey regarding customer pain points. When the survey responses were evaluated, it was clear that certain challenges were moving to the top of the pile. The concerns keeping customers awake at night were the cost of test, the footprint of test equipment on the bench and factory floor, and the need to support changes modularly for rapid growth. The results drove Agilent to create a long-term strategy: it was clear that a more focused approach for modular instrumentation development was needed to address these pain-points, while of course continuing to provide test platforms and strategies in more traditional form factors.

Agilent’s AXIe/PXI modular instrumentation team.

With Agilent already in the modular business supporting standards such as LXI, VXI, and PXI, it was possible to quickly form a new division to address the needs within the modular marketplace. So right after coming together in November 2009, under the guidance of General Manager Larry Desjardin, whose leadership in instrumentation interconnect began with the creation of IEEE-488 standards, the new group was able to make three key decisions:

1. Build a long-term sustainable modular strategy,

2. Increase investment in products supporting the PXI form-factor,

3. Help create a new standard to address higher performance than PXI can support.

Less than a year later, in September 2010, 48 products were announced, impressing customers, surprising some of the existing players, and causing excitement and much discussions in the marketplace.

The company sees the modular expansion as truly complementary to its existing test and measurement products, form factors, and software strategies, with a high level of synergy between modular and traditional, “box” test tools. In Agilent’s view, modular instruments provide a way for breakthrough technologies to come to market more quickly than with box instruments. At the same time, solid measurement science developed while optimizing box instruments is made available to the modular instrument users.

On the other hand, box instruments gain the benefit of the modular field experience with the new technologies, while continuing to provide more optimized measurements than modular instruments, because instrument makers control the design’s environment the modular environment cannot guarantee tight control of factors such as cooling and electronic noise, and so must typically sacrifice some precision to achieve the needed tolerance. The company thus believes that both approaches can be leveraged very efficiently for the foreseeable future.

Richard Comerford