OK, audience participation time… How many readers noticed that the name of this magazine has changed? Hmm, not many… Well, in any case, our new moniker is now PXI, Test & Technology. Pay close attention to the comma in that name.
Reporting on PXI is still our first and primary mission. PXI has had phenomenal growth in the last seven years, both in terms of acceptance and applications addressed. The bandwidth addressed by PXI products is now referred to in terms of Gigahertz rather than Megahertz. And now, with PXI Express on the horizon, there appears to be no end in sight.
But those of us who subscribe to the theory of evolution know there is always a need to change. Animals and other organisms have evolved based on their abilities and their environments. Survival of the fittest, so they say. As animals evolved, many developed a symbiotic relationship with others that further guaranteed their survival.
So where am I going with this? Clearly, PXI has not replaced every other instrumentation architecture on the planet. Instead, instrument applications have migrated toward the architecture that makes the most sense. For example, rack-and-stack instruments, whether they are controlled by GPIB, USB, or the new LXI Architecture, take advantage of the lack of physical constraints of a modular architecture. VXI, while not as strong as it was in the past, is still used for applications that might need the robust shielding and lower noise floor standards of VXI. It should be noted that the theme of last years International Test Conference was Test: Survival of the Fittest.
Also, there are applications that just make no sense in any one particular architecture. You would not build a 1 Kilowatt power supply to fit inside a PXI chassis, right? And any instrument that needed to either source or create a large amount of data would not be connected via GPIB. They just would not survive.
My point is that hybrid systems will be with us for a long time to come. The manufacturer of particular instrumentation architectures will work to find the best competitive or technical reason for the customers to use their products. So PXI will have to “play nice” with everybody else for a long, long time.
Finally, the environment of testing dictates that this magazine must evolve as well. While PXI will always be a big piece of what we report, hence the PXI acronym first, we need to expand our focus and show you what’s happening in all of test and measurement. This means there will be new vendors and users writing for us, new applications discussed, and how the modules that make a test system work together will be our goal.
We recognize that there are other magazines in the market doing a similar service to the industry. But I think that our focus on PXI will present a different perspective that will be of interest. I invite you to write me at bstasonis@opensystems-publishing.com and let me know what you think as we evolve.
