1997 was an interesting year… The movie “Titanic” took in hundreds of millions of dollars, Tiger Woods won his first Masters, the first Harry Potter Book was published, and the cartoon “South Park” debuted and changed forever what we expected from two dimensional persons in our homes… OK, maybe the start of South Park is not something we should memorialize. But as this is a technology magazine, an announcement was made that year that changed the way we build test systems.
On September 1st, 1997, National Instruments issued a press release announcing a product line called PXI, or PCI eXtensions for Instrumentation. Basically, it was PC technology, with feature sets that aided in developing test applications, all packaged in a more rugged form factor than standard PCs and much smaller and lower cost than VXI. There was not a lot of attention given to it by the press, as I recall.
The first public display for PXI was at AUTOTESTCON in late September. It is interesting to note that this is the same conference that the PXISA still focuses much of their marketing efforts at. Fred Bode, retired director of the PXISA, remembers that National Instruments displayed the first PXI products at this conference. Several other companies promised to have PXI modules very soon thereafter. At the time, Fred wrote that PXI was initially viewed as a National Instruments standard and that they were trying to get others interested in the architecture. As National Instruments had the first pro-ducts and a significant lead in development, there was some skepticism in the industry that this would ever be very widely accepted by other vendors. On the other hand, it really looked like a clever idea, and some companies, including Geotest and GenRad (which was where I got involved with PXI) jumped on the bandwagon and quickly endorsed it and began bringing out products. The multi-vendor effort started to change people’s minds.
Putting on my PXISA hat, the perception that PXI was a one company standard was a primary reason for the PXISA to form. In order for the PXI architecture to become a standard, it needed an independent body to promote and manage the specification. So as the Alliance formed, National Instruments handed over the intellectual rights of the specification to the PXISA.
The “knock” against PXI by the competition in the early days was that it was a lower cost instrumentation standard, better than simple PC card instrumentation, but not accurate enough for “sophisticated” instrumentation systems. This was underlined by the lack of availability of DMMs with greater than 5 1/2 digits, and the lack of RF and microwave instruments. As those two classes of instruments became available, that argument went away and PXI solidified itself as an instrumentation standard to be considered for virtually any application.
So look at PXI now! Thanks in part to the efforts of the PXISA, there are more than 55 companies producing or supporting PXI. There are literally thousands of products available. The bandwidth of LXI instruments has exceeded 6 GHz. With the new PXI Express portion of the specification, new applications requiring large amounts of data are being addressed in PXI. How’s that for “simple instrumentation”?
Again putting on my PXISA hat, we are proud of what we have accomplished in only 10 years. And this year we are going to celebrate our heritage. This magazine will have more details on the history and future of PXI in the Summer issue, and watch the PXISA website for upcoming events that celebrate 10 years of technology adoption.
Now let me use my soap box to reach out to the PXISA members. What are you doing to celebrate the tenth anniversary? What should the Alliance do? Your input is requested and welcome, so write me and share your ideas.
So let’s bake a cake, get out the candles and champagne, and perhaps a copy of this magazine. After all, PXI is why we started! Enjoy!
