PXI versatility can enhance 5G testing

6th July 2015

Mick Elliott

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At Wimbledon, strawberries and cream were being served up. At the Madejski Stadium, Reading National Instruments was serving up PXI and 5G, as natural a complement says the company as the traditional fare for the tennis folk. Abhay Samant, Section Manager, RF & Wireless Test, makes a compelling case. There is no doubt in his mind that PXI is on the charge.

“PXI now makes up nearly 20 per cent of the test and measurement market,” he told delegates at National Instruments’ Automated Test Summit. Market research company Frost and Sullivan is forecasting a 17.6 compound annual growth rate for PXI making the market worth $1.8bn by 2020.

PXI through PCI Express 3.0 is offering so many different possibilities for 5G,” says Jeremy Twaits, Technical Marketing Engineer at National Instruments UK.

As 5G research progresses bandwidths will be heading in one direction – up.

“LTE bandwidth is about 40MHz, wireless LAN needs 160MHz, for 5G wireless we will be looking at even higher bandwidth”, Twaits remarks. “At NI Week next month we will be showing a VSA module capable of handling 765MHz.”

This progress is being made at the expense of the more venerable VXI instrument technology, according to Samant. “Obsolete instruments are leading to a shrinking user base and even the aerospace and military, traditional users of VXI are deserting to PXI,” he claims.

In March National Instruments introduced PXI Express with PCI Express 3.0 technology with the PXIe-1085 24 GB/s chassis. It has 64X more system bandwidth or throughput. And the signal latency is nearly 5000X lower than that of the LAN bus.

“These attributes along with software-designed functionality, integrated timing and sync, and reduced size, weight and power will all lower the cost of test,” says Samant.