PXI Express for Real-Time Control and High Performance Acquisition (April 2007)

Since its release in 1998, the PXI industry standard has quickly gained adoption in a variety of measurement and automation systems including Fermilab's semiconductor quench detection and protection system. Two motivators for adopting the PXI platform are the high-speed PCI data communication bus and integrated timing and triggering features. Now, as the commercial PC industry improves bus bandwidth by evolving PCI to PCI express, PXI has evolved by integrating PCI express into the PXI standard to create PXI express. This paper gives an overview of the PXI platform including the data bus and timing and triggering features of PXI and PXI express.