According to Bob Rennard, LXI president, approximately 150 product developers, system integrators and university professors gathered at the LXI Consortium Meeting in Beijing, China in late June to fulfill a number of objectives. These included raising the awareness of LXI in the Chinese electronics industry and assisting all the attendees to better understand LXI so they can implement it in their products.

Aerospace and defense projects, such as radar and satellite system deployments, often require many years of planning, research and development across several geographic regions. These projects require reliable test and measurement solutions that can adapt through time and are available in small form factor for easy worldwide deployment.

The LXI standard is a next-generation LAN-based modular platform for automated test systems that was developed to address such challenges.

Agilent Technologies has played a key role in the development of the LXI standard. The standard was developed by the LXI consortium, a not-for-profit corporation comprised of 40 leading test and measurement companies and chartered by Agilent. The LXI standard combines built-in measurement science and PC-standard input/output (I/O) connectivity that uses the widely accepted Ethernet communications interface.

It was in 2004 that Agilent Technologies — building upon the IEEE-488 open standard communications bus, which had its beginnings in 1972 and VXI which came along 13 years later — introduced LXI (LAN-based eXtensions for Instrumentation) as a modular instrumentation standard for the U.S. military.

LXI brings together the reduced size of VXI, the high throughput of LAN, and the high-performance measurements of GPIB. No cardcage is required; there is no slot 0 nor is there an expensive PC to instrument communications link. LXI modules are full-rack width, 1U tall or half-rack width, 1U or 2U tall. Signals enter and exit the module at its front panel while LAN (IEEE 802.3), power, and trigger cables connect at the rear of the module. Modules are designed to be easily mounted in a standard 19-inch rack or stacked on the bench.