High-speed modular PXI Express instruments - 27 June 2007

National Instruments (NI) has released what it claims are the industry’s first PXI Express high-speed instruments as well as the industry’s first 18-slot PXI Express chassis.

The new modular instruments include the NI PXIe-5122 100 MSps, 100 MHz dual-channel digitiser and the NI PXIe-6537 and NI PXIe-6536 50 MHz and 25 MHz 32-channel digital I/O modules. The NI PXIe-1065 18-slot chassis offers up to 1 GBps per-slot dedicated bandwidth and a combination of both PXI and PXI Express slots. The new PXI Express products are ideal for applications such as signal intelligence, spectral monitoring, semiconductor chip characterisation and video test.

"PXI Express builds on commercial PCI Express technology to expand the applications served by the multivendor PXI standard," said Eric Starkloff, National Instruments director of test product marketing. "The addition of high-speed data streaming capability to PXI, while preserving compatibility to the more than 1200 existing PXI modules from more than 70 vendors, has made PXI a leading platform for modular instrumentation."

The new PXI Express instruments add to the wide range of PXI mixed-signal products from NI that include high-speed digitisers/oscilloscopes, high-speed digital I/O, baseband and RF analysers and signal generators. The new instruments offer the enhanced functionality of high-speed data recording and playback using the latest industry-standard bus, PXI Express, which delivers up to 1 GBps of bidirectional streaming throughput on a x4 PXI Express link. With the NI PXIe-5122 digitiser for example, engineers can capture high-speed analog signals on two simultaneous channels at 100 MSps with 14-bit resolution and stream the signals across the PXI Express bus at the digitiser's full rate of 400 MBps to the PC memory and/or hard disk. Engineers also can use the NI PXIe-6536/37 digital I/O modules (based on a x1 PXI Express link) to stream digital waveforms to and from the module at the full 200 MBps data rate.

The NI PXIe-1065 18-slot chassis complements the existing NI PXIe-1062 8-slot chassis to address higher-channel-density PXI Express-based systems. The new chassis includes a combination of PXI and PXI Express hybrid slots to accept a mix of both existing PXI modules and high-bandwidth PXI Express modules.

All of the new products integrate with a variety of software including the NI LabVIEW graphical development environment, LabVIEW SignalExpress interactive measurement software and NI TestStand test management software.

For more information contact National Instruments, +27 (0)800 203 199, sales@natinst.co.za, www.ni.com/southafrica