Modules, chassis turn system-design concept into systems

Modules, chassis turn system-design concept into systems

By leveraging existing AdvancedTCA, PXI, LXI, and IVI standards, the AdvancedTCA Extensions for Instrumentation (AXIe) standard unveiled in 2009 aims to create an open, robust ecosystem of high-performance components, products, and systems for a broad range of general-purpose instrumentation and semiconductor test applications, while at the same time providing greater scalability and rack-space efficiency than PXI for high-channel-count systems. AXIe is to be compatible with PXI and support LAN and PCIe connectivity, and integrate easily with LXI and PXI instrumentation. Sounds good, right? So where’s the hardware and software to support it?

This past fall, one of the AXIe consortium’s founders, Agilent Technologies, unveiled 46 new PXI and AXIe products — the M91xx, M92xx, M93xx family is the largest modular-product introduction ever in the industry. PXI and AXIe chassis leverage PCIe Gen 2 technology on the backplane to enable data throughput to 8 Gbytes/s. Each module driver takes full advantage of register access and DMA transfers, reducing measurement latency and increasing throughput, and the modular platform is integrated with industry standard VSA software, enabling flexible modulation analysis and demodulation of a broad range of standard-based and general-purpose digital signals and formats. So now AXIe is open for business.

Agilent Technologies
Santa Clara , CA
Sales 800-829-4444
www.agilent.com