Choosing the Right Platform for Switching: PXI, USB or LXI?

When an engineer is designing a functional test system, it is normally the goal to design and integrate the best system in terms of measurement accuracy, throughput, and budget. Too often switching is the last section to be added. How switching is implemented in your test strategy can affect accuracy and repeatability. It is important to note that you do not need to keep all instrumentation and switching in the same platform. In this paper, we will show an overview of the three most popular platforms used for switching today, the advantages of each in various switching applications, and provide some basic questions to ask as you integrate any test system. Our goals today are simple - we want to make you “dangerous” in terms of switching platforms. By that we mean that we can't make you an expert by reading our paper, but we will arm you with enough knowledge to research for more details. We assume the reader understands the practices of good Switching system design.