Introducing AXIe – the next test in town!
25 October 2010
First we had VXI, then PXI and LXI. Now there is a new kid on the XI block.
I spoke to Larry Desjardin, Marketing Manager of Agilent’s Modular Product Operation, who is championing the new standard.
As with the other XI standards that have come before it, AXIe is backed by a consortium whose role it is to set the standard. The first meeting of the three strong consortium met in November 2009, and by June 2010 they had grown to eight and ratified the first standard. This standard can be downloaded from www.axiestandard.org and is an open standard for all to use. The standard defines the chassis, interconnect and everything else you would expect in a modular system.
So AXIe, what is it and what is it for? Simply speaking it is a modular instrumentation platform based on the PCIe bus, but has a substantially bigger card size than PXI. Larry Desjardin takes up the description: “A rule of thumb is that if we can do it in PXI, we will do it. If we need more power, or more cooling, we moved to AXIe. One of the key things that you see right away is just the board size, but there are other things as well - the whole timing, triggering, synchronisation type buses that we have added are really state-of-the-art. We have been able to demonstrate very low jitter in standard clock. I think we are demonstrating 12 ps rms of jitter - this is world-class backplane type standard.
“The other thing is, local bus is block to block communication, and if you go through the math, it is pretty remarkable. There are 62 lines of local bus, each one with current FPGAs can be driven at 10 Gb per second. Multiply that up, and it is 620 Gb per second - there is no architecture that is close to that. Local bus just enables all sorts of different applications and allows you to have what I call ‘modular systems within modular systems’. It is a very flexible architecture.”
When I asked Larry who it was going to appeal to and for what uses he responded: “Systems integrators are finding this really attractive. I think applications tend to be where there is big additional content or high-speed data converters - any one of these systems also requires custom electronics and services where there is a lot of value-added, signal conditioning. So if you're a systems integrator, and you want to do your own design, you either have to get everything to fit onto a board of PXI size, or you can have a board of the size of AXIe, which gives you a lot more opportunities. Going back to VXI., one of the surprise markets was in people building their own custom cards, and AXIe gives you more area for doing that more efficiently.”
Test engineers or systems integrators looking to plunge headlong into the market will have to temper their enthusiasm slightly as there are currently limited options. There are 2 and 5 slot chassis from Agilent, who also supply a PCIe Gen 3 analyser. The only other company who has AXIe product on the market is Test Evolution (www.testevolution.com) whose products are focussed on semiconductor test. However, the architecture is intended to be scalable and general purpose instruments can be fitted into the cage.
As for the immediate future? “Digital high-speed data converters are the first perfect applications for AXIe,” Larry concluded. “And those are the types of product you are likely to be seen from Agilent.”
Contact Details and Archive...
Most Viewed Articles...