PXI Express

The new Personal Computer video interface bus, PCI Express has been out for a few years now. The PCIe interface replaced the AGP bus which was used as a high speed video expansion slot shipped in PCs. As a video bus PCIe used a number of redundant lanes, or 16x to archive its high speed throughput. Because of its 2.5Gbps transfer speed (1x) the interface also started to replace the aging PCI bus, used for all other expansion slot functions.

Any way the PCIe bus started to replace all the other embedded buses based on the PCI interface. The upgrade path for cPCI becomes cPCI Express, PCMCIA went to ExpressCard, MiniPCI becomes Mini PCI Express, and so on.

Because many of the upgrades use the same physical interface, board format and function, but only change the electrical interface, page additions have been slow. Of course it takes a year or so before the interface is adopted by OEMs too.

A number of years ago the VME interface bus migrated to an instrumentation bus called VXI, low noise ~ high rel. Compact PCI [cPCI] did the same thing with the PXI interface [Compact PCI for Instrumentation]. PXI continued the advancement moving to PXI Express, using PCIe as the electrical interface and dropping the PCI bus.

So, four new pages were added to the web site today relating to PXIe;
System Slot pin out, PXI Express.
System Timing Slot, PXI Express.
Peripheral Slot pin out, PXI Express.
Hybrid Peripheral Slot pin out, PXI Express.

The pages link off the main PXIe page and have a listing in the html -- but because of those additions the pages do not yet contain the pinout data. Like all new pages, I add the page before the data gets loaded. A number of pages relating to the embedded PCIe interface have been updated.

PXI Express uses the same card form factor as PXI and cPCI, and some VME board sizes.