NI Debuts All-Hybrid PXIe Chassis and Intel Core i7 Controller
September 17, 2012. National Instruments at Autotestcon highlighted a new all-hybrid PXI Express chassis as well as a new Intel Core i7 processor-based controller. The chassis features PCI Express 2.0 x8 links to every slot for increased data throughput, resulting in lower test times and reduced cost of test. The hybrid slot connectors deliver maximum flexibility in PXI and PXI Express module slot replacement, while the addition of hot-swappable fans and an easily replaceable power supply improves system availability in high-performance applications.
“With the release of the NI PXIe-1085 all-hybrid-slot chassis, NI continues to demonstrate its leadership in PXI, offering unrivaled performance, flexibility and value” said Eric Starkloff, NI vice president of product marketing for systems platforms. “This chassis expands the reach of PXI into even more demanding high-performance streaming applications such as RF record and playback while preserving backward compatibility with PXI modules released in the past 15 years.”
Remote system health monitoring improves system manageability, and hot-swappable fans and a tool-less, easily replaceable power supply improve total system availability.
Core i7 Processor Boosts Controller
National Instruments also introduced the NI PXIe-8135 controller, which features the quad-core 3rd-generation Intel Core i7 processor and USB 3.0 connectivity. The NI PXIe-8135 helps engineers achieve shorter test times and increase automated test throughput, further advancing PXI instrumentation for high-performance test, measurement and control applications.
“At NI, we are continuously investing in the PXI platform and pairing it with the latest Intel processor offerings,” said Robert Canik, vice president of R&D for core PXI and distributed control at National Instruments. “The NI PXIe-8135 embedded controller is a great example of how our long-standing collaboration with Intel helps us give engineers advanced technology to address demanding test and measurement challenges.”
“The 3rd generation Intel® Core™ i7 processor being used in the NI PXIe-8135 embedded controller provides superior performance and next-generation I/O technologies to help meet the intensive processing demands of the latest automated test and control applications,” said Matt Langman, director of marketing for the Intelligent Systems Group at Intel, in a press release. “Because of Intel’s processor architecture advancements, National Instruments can continue to deliver the highest performance possible for test engineers.”
The product features a quad-core 3rd generation Intel Core i7-3610QE processor, with up to 3.3 GHz clock frequency. The NI PXIe-8135 delivers up to 85% performance increase compared with NI’s previous-generation embedded controller. USB 3.0 connectivity offers up to 10X faster instrument communication for transferring and storing data externally. Four PCI Express x4 Gen 2 links interface from the embedded controller to the chassis backplane provide up to 8 GB/s of system throughput for high-bandwidth streaming applications.
In addition, NI at Autotestcon highlighted the NI PXIe-5644R RF vector signal transceiver (VST), which combines a vector signal generator and vector signal analyzer with a user-programmable FPGA into a single PXI modular instrument.