PXI controllers use Intel chips

PXI-8195

National Instruments (NI) announced what it claims as the industry's first PXI controllers to use the mobile intel 915gm express chipset—the PXI-8195 and PXI-8196. The PXI-8196 is also touted to be the first embedded controller to use the power of a 2GHz Intel pentium m 760 processor, making it the industry's highest-performance embedded controller and increasing its overall performance by more than 50 percent compared to existing PXI controllers operating with the 2.5GHz Mobile Intel Pentium 4 processor, said NI. Meanwhile, the PXI-8195 includes the 1.5GHz Intel Celeron M 370 processor.

Both controllers feature dual-channel DDR2 memory, with a maximum capacity of 2GB, and are designed for applications requiring intensive analysis or system development, such as ATE, military/aerospace, communications, industrial and consumer electronics applications. Both products provide full-rate Gigabit Ethernet. By offering Gigabit Ethernet, the more than 1,200 available PXI/CompactPCI modules now can benefit from this high-speed interface.

PXI-8196

Created for use in PXI and CompactPCI systems, the PXI-8196 employs an Intel Pentium M processor that delivers higher performance at lower clock rates than previous-generation processors. The controller's Mobile Intel 915GM Express chipset provides the PCI Express interface to the Gigabit Ethernet and to the ExpressCard/34 slot for high-speed interface to numerous peripheral I/O types. Engineers can use an ExpressCard to add more I/O, including a second Gigabit Ethernet port, 802.11 wireless LAN, removable flash memory, IEEE 1394 (FireWire) and Bluetooth. Additional PXI-8196 integrated peripherals include four USB 2.0 ports, a GPIB interface and both a serial and parallel port.

The PXI-8195 and PXI-8196 work with the entire suite of NI's modular instruments and offer seamless integration with the NI LabVIEW graphical development environment, as well as NI TestStand, LabWindows/CVI and other common development environments for automated test applications such as C, C++, Visual Basic and Microsoft Visual Studio .NET. The controllers ship with Microsoft Windows XP Professional pre-installed, and offer hard drive-based recovery that engineers can use to restore their systems back to factory default if needed.

PXI Systems Alliance
PCI eXtensions for Instrumentation (PXI) is an open specification governed by the PXI Systems Alliance that defines a rugged, CompactPCI-based platform optimized for test, measurement and control. PXI products are compatible with the CompactPCI industrial computer standard that is supported by more than 60 member companies and more than 1,000 products.