National Instruments Cabled PCI Express - Manual

National Instruments Cabled PCI Express

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Table of Contents:

  • Page 4 – Software-centric Synthetic and Virtual Instrumentation
  • Page 5 – Figure 5. Synthetic Instrument RF Block Diagram; Relevant NI Products and Whitepapers; NI TestStand Test Management Framework
  • Page 6 – Whitepapers; NI offers a
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Overview

Cabled PCI Express is a cabled serial bus used for high-performance interconnect of system components. It is based on
PCI Express and so provides a scalable, high-bandwidth, low-latency bus. In measurement and automation, cabled PCI
Express is very appealing to high-performance applications using a host PC for measurement processing and analysis.
For example, cabled PCI Express is currently used to connect a host PC to a PXI (PCI eXtensions for Instrumentation)
chassis with sustained transfer rates of nearly 800 Mbytes/s. The high performance, low cost, and easy connectivity of
cabled PCI Express makes it ideal for a number of measurement applications, and therefore, its applications is expected
to expand to serve more applications in the future. This paper examines cabled PCI express technology and both its
current and future application in measurement and automation systems.

What Is Cabled PCI Express?

Cabled PCI Express is the next generation peripheral bus for servers, desktops, and laptops. Cabled PCI Express will
have the following advantages:

Wide use in standard PCs means low implementation costs

High bandwidth – 4 Gigabytes / second

Low latency – 300-700 nanoseconds

Application software and operating systems run without changes due to no software changes from PCI model

At least 15 standardized form factors including cabled PCI Express

Only standard that is designed for chip-to-chip, board-to-board, and box-to-box applications

Cabled PCI Express is being defined by the

PCI-SIG

standards body as an extension of the

PCI Express Base

specification

. Extending PCI Express from box-to-box and over longer distances is the goal of cabled PCI Express.

Cabled PCI Express provides a simple yet high-performance bus for expanding PC and measurement I/O. Some
commercial applications of cabled PCI Express include interfaces on laptop or small form factor PC to connect
peripherals to laptops and split-system desktop PCs that can move the CPU box under the desk while keeping user I/O
easily accessible on top of it. The cabled PCI Express specification anticipates cables up to 7 meters long and still meet
the PCI Express timing requirements. It is nearing completion with the final release expected in the fall of 2006.

Products Available

National Instruments, as a leading innovator in applying commercial technology to test and measurement applications,
provides a line of remote controllers to connect VXI and PXI chassis to PCs, called

MXI

(Multiplatform eXtensions for

Instrumentation). The first MXI product, MXI-1, was used to connect VXI mainframes to PCs in 1991. The latest
products, MXI Express, use cabled PCI Express to connect a PXI chassis to a host PC. MXI Express remote controllers
are available now in x1 to connect to a PXI chassis and x4 configurations provide up to nearly 800 MB/s of sustained
throughput to PXI Express chassis. There is both a PCIe (see Figure 1) and ExpressCard (see Figure 2) host interface
for use with desktops and laptops, respectively. The primary purpose of using cabled PCI Express in

MXI Express

was

to take advantage of the higher performance, form factor options and lower costs of PCI Express.

Cabled PCI Express as a Standard
Interface for Virtual and Synthetic
Instruments

Document Version 1
© 2006 National Instruments Corporation. All rights reserved.

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Summary

Page 4 - Software-centric Synthetic and Virtual Instrumentation

Figure 3. Cabled PCI Express makes MXI Express 80X higher bandwidth than MXI-1 While bandwidth has dramatically increased, the costs of these links have decreased. Figure 4 shows how the price perbandwidth has dropped significantly over the last 15 years. Figure 4: From $450/MB/s to $2.25/MB/s – Cab...

Page 5 - Figure 5. Synthetic Instrument RF Block Diagram; Relevant NI Products and Whitepapers; NI TestStand Test Management Framework

The focus of the SIWG has been primarily on the SI concepts as applied to RF stimulus and measurement systems. Dataintensive applications, like RF testing, require a high-bandwidth, low-latency bus to connect the IF digitizers to theprocessor (see Figure 5). Figure 5. Synthetic Instrument RF Block D...

Page 6 - Whitepapers; NI offers a

Whitepapers NI offers a Designing Next Generation Test Systems Developers Guide . This guide is collection of whitepapers designed to help you develop test systems that lower your cost, increase your test throughput, and can scale with futurerequirements. To read the entire developers guide, you can...

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