Niwot, CO – August 26, 2008 – In June, 2007 the VXI Consortium
formed a working group to update VXI-1 Revision 3.0 to extend the VXI P1 and P2
connectors to 5-rows per VME64x and to add high-speed serial capabilities to the
VXI bus via VITA 41. x-2006 (also known as VXS). The revised specification will
be released as VXI-1 Revision 4.0 upon its review and approval by the VXI community.
The VXIbus Consortium Board of Directors has now approved full support of this proposal.
Rationales for Changes:
The addition of the VME64x 5-row connector allows for more power lines, the usage
of 2eSST protocol, as well as additional clock, local bus and synchronization resources.
The five-row connectors allow the VXIbus to take advantage of the latest VME spec
power and speed improvements. They also augment the instrumentation capabilities
of the bus while maintaining backward and forward compatibility. This significant
performance increase will allow VXI to achieve parallel bus performance that is
equal to that of the VME64x bus and faster than its test and measurement bus competitors.
This new development is expected to encourage the development of a new generation
of VXIbus products with enhanced instrumentation and VME64x capabilities.
The extension of the existing bus with the P0 connector allows the usage of high-speed
serial buses like Gigabit Ethernet and PCI Express for high-speed board-to-board
communication in a VXIbus system. These capabilities are important for next-generation
applications like high-speed serial bus test, high channel count data acquisition,
parallel test and measurement implementations and synthetic instrumentation.
With the introduction of lower cost multi-core and 64-bit processors and the prevalence
of PCI Express (PCIe) and Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) for personal computers, the VXS
protocols are likely to be popular in the future. These changes will allow the VXI
platform to thrive as a solution to the next generation of demanding test requirements
in the areas of high-speed data acquisition, parallel test, digital bus test, and
RF synthetic instrumentation.
Compatibility:
5-Row P1&P2: The inner three rows (A-C) of P1 and P2 will not
change and the new 5- row connector will not interfere with legacy three row connectors
on legacy VXI
modules.
VXS P0: This new connector fits between P1 and P2 without interfering
with the fit of
pre-VXI 4.0 modules.
About the VXIbus Consortium
The VXIbus Consortium is a not-for-profit corporation made up of the leading companies
in the Test & Measurement Industry. The consortium’s goals are to develop, support,
and promote the VXIbus architecture, the most popular open standard platform for
data acquisition and ATE systems in the world today. For more information, visit
www.vxibus.org.
Products and company names listed are trademarks or trade names of their respective
companies.
