Express entry to PXI
30 December 2010
The PXI standard is now well into its second decade but, having largely sat on the sidelines during the meteoric growth of this modular platform, one of the industry’s biggest T&M suppliers is joining the party. To find out why, Tim Fryer asked Larry Desjardin, Marketing Manager of Agilent’s Modular Product Operation (MPO).
Tim Fryer: I am intrigued because I have followed PXI for a number of years and your participation has been low-key so far.
Larry Desjardin: That is right, we bought a company called Aquiris, and then PXI Technology, so through them we were actually members of the PXI Systems Alliance. But to be totally honest we didn't have a major offering. Until now.
TF: So why has PXI become appealing to you now?
LD: Being an established platform is one of the things that made it attractive to us. A year ago, when we were looking at what we should be doing in the modular instruments market, we decided we wanted to go with established open standards like PXI.
TF: So in that year, since you've decided to go down the PXI route how many new products, have you introduced?
LD: We have 48 new products, mostly PXI, but also, AXIe and some IO products that work with both of them. Our first AXIe products are absolutely the first products in that market.
TF: How did you pick out these first 40 PXI products and are they the first of many?
LD: I'll be very honest. When we first decided to get into the market about a year ago, we decided if we were going to do it, we were going to do it right and we weren't just going to trickle products out. We looked at what we could do in one year – how we could leverage design expertise and work with partners to get products okayed in one year.
We thought there were a number of products that were the minimum viable number needed. We knew that we needed a PXI chassis, and we believe that we have come up with the best PXI chassis in the world for a number of reasons. We chose initially not to use an embedded controller, but chose to use cable PXI.express, which brings with it all sorts of advantages, and then we needed a common set of instruments. You need voltmeter, you need a digitising scope, arbitrary waveform generators and switches. About half of our offering is switch modules.
TF: Within the Systems Alliance there are people who've got many of the PXI options covered. When you were looking at what you could offer to the PXI party, were you looking to bring something new to the game or were you being more openly competitive?
LD: We did both. Firstly we thought you just needed to have certain basic things and in that case, we thought ‘there may be many things that are sufficient - but what can we add as a differentiator?’ What we have in all of our modules that you don't necessarily get in other PXI instruments is the wide set of drivers that we offer.
I think we are the only ones who offer IVI.com - drivers which work great with the natural Microsoft environment. We decided we were going to be totally open systems. We support LabVIEW, we support LAB Windows CVI, IVI C and the G drivers. But what we found is when we talk to customers there is a wide range of requirements the customers want to work with.
First of all there is Agilent VEE, there is Microsoft Visual Studio, MATHLAB is very popular, even Excel. So by doing these free drivers we meet all of those requirements – and even if the modules were identical we have a number of drivers that can expand the number of environments that we can work in. And then what is interesting within Agilent, is that we have six different operations that produce products.
A lot of these different operations, said, ‘we have a big introduction coming this year, that we could deliver in this format to the market.’ So a little bit of it was opportunistic in that what we are releasing is what we were able to produce in a single year.
TF: So all divisions of Agilent have contributed?
LD: Yes, this was an Agilent wide strategy. So my operation MPO sent the architecture and rules to the other divisions using the CCE. CCE is a Common Customer Experience. It is a long list of requirements that every product that Agilent comes out with in the modular domain supports – like LabVIEW, LABWindows, MATHLAB, and all these other drivers and front panels; the way that we do learning products is the same, the same install disk. So the customer has the same experience from when they look at the web, when they choose the products, when they order it, when they open the package, how they install the disc, the whole experience is that it comes from one company.
TF: Out of your 40 or so new products are there any that bring something completely new to the PXI arena?
LD: Absolutely, let me outline a few highlights – the most interesting one of these, I believe, is the chassis. Most people say, you can't innovate on the chassis, but we have proved them wrong. This thing about having all hybrid slots is huge. The problem has been that you couldn't make slots all through the chassis that would take PCI and PCI express versions.
People said it was impossible and had proved that it was impossible, because there was no place to put the switches – and so this ruins the flexibility and modularity that you really want out of modular systems. We are the first and only company to have all PXI hybrid slots. And we're not telling anyone how we did it because it is a trade secret, but that adds a phenomenal amount of flexibility.
We also have an air cooling system that allows us to fit in 4U of rack space whereas nearly all other cages have space underneath for cooling. It is also totally serviceable in the rack, because you go from behind the chassis to replace the fans and the power supplies, as they are the two big failure items. Something else completely new is the microwave signal analyser we introduced. It is a complete set of modules including down converters, local oscillators, digitisers, but it also has software on top of that.
That makes it act as an integrated instrument even though it is modular. This is something that we really put in quite a bit of engineering to get the specs out of a PXI system, and then marrying that with our vector signal analyser software (from the VSA 89 600) - so you can now do real microwave analysis, and the thing acts as a single instrument. Another highlight is the voltmeter. The voltmeter is the fastest on the PXI market. People have these banner specs, readings per second, and what they do is they set something up in a stringing mode and just zoom off.
This isn't how most test systems are. There is stimulus and response in some systems. You take a measurement, you get a response and you compare it. It is that interactive loop that is critical. This voltmeter by itself looks like it is 10 times faster than anything else on the market. If the path switches have the same overhead, it looks like you get an overall test system advantage of two to one.
TF: The PXI platform can be used from design through prototype and into manufacturing. Are you principally aiming at any particular end of the PXI market?
LD: No - we're going for both ends. The one thing that is common in all of these applications is it's an automated test set. So anyone who wanted bench instruments will use bench instruments – they will be a lot better off. But one thing that modular systems have in common is that they are all involved in the automated test set up. And the automation is in R&D and design validation, where they have to control a number of products together. The other main use is manufacturing. And actually a third one does largely exist in aerospace/defence where they use it for repair, for instance, we are finding the microwave signal analyser is creating interest. People want to put this together in a small test set that they can get out in a hangar or move to the front line. But I would say that these repair applications are smaller than the other two. The other two are equally split between design validation and manufacturing.
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