PXI based test equipment offers lower costs

Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team May 10, 2001

Standardising on PXI technology has allowed Alfautomazione to save a very large amount of time during the design process and significantly lower costs on its test equipment

Going back to five years ago we'd see a very different scenario in the PC and data acquisition technology.

We surely remember those personal computers and data acquisition interfaces we were using to build automated control and supervising systems.

Software drivers configuration and hardware installation have always created problems that every single engineer had to face at least once in the life.

Speed has always been an issue everyone has pursued, while precision and reliability always represented targets hard to achieve.

The PCI bus, and later on its extension Compact PCI, have brought a tremendous change into the T and M world but only after the advent of PXI its applications grew very fast, becoming a true industrial standard.

When PXI showed up into the market it changed the way systems were designed.

Its compactness and rugged form factor allowed its use for new applications, saving space into systems, with higher performances, precision, reliability and much more easiness regarding expandability.

Every single time in the system the requested performances don't strictly require a stand-alone instrument (like spectrum analyzers, scopes, DMM, etc), a PXI data acquisition board (or a PXI instrument) can be used with costs saving and higher flexibility.

It's a matter of fact that (depending on the requested system specifications) a PXI DAQ board can be used as a DMM, as a scope or a spectrum analyzer and, in this case, the software what really makes the difference.

It's what guarantees the hardware reusability and the standards available on the market allow system designers to easily integrate several different functionalities with few hardware components.

In the T and M world this is a major issue since systems become even more complex.

Maintenance and support are the most cost-effective issues but, leveraging on the PXI technology, engineers can now design systems using standard components, available and supported worldwide, driven by standard software drivers that, most of the times, are directly provided by the hardware manufacturers.

The PXI solution also guarantees expandability through larger chassis and interconnection buses through standard communication interfaces like GPIB, Ethernet, RS-232/485, CAN and/or specific buses as for the automotive and telecom world.

Every single day new interfaces show up in the market and new features become available to be integrated into the systems.

The availability of new solutions and interfaces for the PXI market surely will make it the standard platform for many years.

Many hardware manufacturer (like in the switching matrixes world) have also already made available PXI solutions based on a 6U form factor, instead of the traditional 3U one.

And this will become necessary migration since every single day more resources are needed.

Even if some products are already available, instruments, real-time and interoperability are only some of the features that will be the future of PXI since the market requests them, like many others.

Test equipment manufacturers have always been looking for new solutions to remain competitive on the market and today we can surely say that only those of them who got the PXI way won.

What will be the next challenge? Maybe the PXI technology will give us the answer.

In the meanwhile some test equipment manufacturers, like Alfautomazione, completely standardized on the PXI technology, adopting such a solution on every single machine.

This approach allowed Alfautomazione to save a very large amount of time during the design process and significantly lowered the costs related with the support activities.

That was a winning choice.

A choice that made Alfautomazione to become on of the market leaders of the EOL Functional test equipments market.