NI introduces PXI Express modules and controllers
Rick Nelson, Chief Editor -- Test & Measurement World, 8/11/2006 7:33:00 AM
AUSTIN, TX. National Instruments chose NIWeek held here this week to announce data-acquisition (DAQ) modules for PXI Express. The NI PXIe-6259 and NI PXIe-6251 M Series modules deliver fast analog and digital I/O with up to 250-Mbyte/s dedicated per-slot bandwidth. In addition to the new PXI Express DAQ modules, NI announced four PXI Express controllers. The remote, embedded, and rack-mount controllers provide up to 1-Gbyte/s system and slot bandwidth.
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With two new NI MXI-Express remote controllers, the NI PXIe-PCIe8371/2 x4 ("by four"--a link consisting of four PCI Express lanes), engineers can control PXI Express and CompactPCI Express systems from a PC equipped with PCI Express through a fully transparent, high-bandwidth cabled PCI Express link. The x4 MXI-Express remote controllers provide 1 Gbyte/s total system bandwidth. The NI PXIe-PCIe8371 features a cabled PCI Express link from a PC to one PXI Express chassis, and the NI PXIe-PCIe8372 has two cabled PCI Express links to simultaneously control two PXI Express chassis for a higher channel count. This bandwidth represents a more than eight times improvement compared with other industry-standard cable interfaces such as high-speed USB, Gigabit Ethernet, GPIB, MXI-2, and MXI-3.
The new NI PXIe-8105 x4 dual-core embedded controller also offers up to 1-Gbyte/s system bandwidth and 1-Gbyte/s slot bandwidth, and it features a 2.0-GHz Intel Core Duo processor T2500. With two computing engines in one physical processor, a dual-core processor can simultaneously execute two tasks, which makes it suitable for multitasking environments, such as Windows XP, and multithreaded applications, such as the LabView graphical-development platform. Engineers can use the NI PXIe-8105 controller for analysis-intensive applications such as communications test.
Finally, the NI PXIe-8351 x4 dual-core rack-mount controller is a 1U PXI Express controller that uses a cabled PCI Express connection to the PXI Express system. The NI PXIe-8351 controller features a 3.0-GHz dual-core Intel Pentium D processor 830, dual Gigabit Ethernet, and SATA II RAID-0 hard drive configurations for applications requiring high-speed streaming to disk, such as acoustic imaging and RF spectral monitoring. The rack-mount controller offers up to 1-Gbyte/s system bandwidth.
