PXI Modules

PXI combines the high-speed PCI bus with integrated timing and triggering designed specifically for measurement and automation applications to deliver significant performance improvements over older architectures.

The following figure shows a typical PXI chassis installation.

Using PXI-Compatible Products with Standard CompactPCI Products

The ability to use PXI-compatible products with standard CompactPCI products is an important feature provided by the PXI Specification, revision 2.1. If you use a PXI-compatible plug-in device in a standard CompactPCI chassis, you cannot use PXI-specific functions, but you can still use the basic plug-in device functions. For example, the PXI trigger bus on an NI signal generator is available in a PXI chassis but not in a CompactPCI chassis. The CompactPCI specification permits vendors to develop sub-buses that co-exist with the basic PCI interface on the CompactPCI bus. Compatible operation is not guaranteed between CompactPCI devices with different sub-buses nor between CompactPCI devices with sub-buses and PXI. The standard implementation for CompactPCI does not include these sub-buses. NI signal generators work in any standard CompactPCI chassis. PXI-specific features, such as PXI_Trig bus and PXI_CLK10 reference are implemented on the J2 connector of the CompactPCI bus.