Internet/Network Trends and Technologies
That Will Impact T&M

By Steve Schink, LXI Consortium President
Keysight Technologies

The LXI Consortium will be celebrating the 10th anniversary of the LXI Standard in 2015.  We have had unprecedented Test and Measurement (T&M) industry success with the development and adoption of the LXI (LAN eXtensions for Instruments) standard.  
The current Version 1.4 of the LXI specification has been in place since 2011.  The maturity and stability of the LXI Standard enables the LXI Consortium to embark on an exciting effort to develop an LXI Reference Design and Implementation for its members to use. 

So is our work on the LXI specification nearly done?   What is the future of LXI?  One way to answer that is to look at the internet/network trends and technologies and assess the impacts they may have on the Test and Measurement (T&M) industry.

The world is moving into a new era where everything is connected, “The Internet of Everything (IoE)”. 

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Progressing the LXI Standard
Reference Design

By David Owen
Technical Chair, LXI Consortium
Pickering Interfaces

The current Version 1.4 of the LXI specification http://www.lxistandard.org/Specifications/Specifications.aspx has been in place since 2011, it differs from Version 1.3 (released 2008) mainly in the way it treats optional features (Extended Functions), so it has been a remarkably stable standard.

Since Version 1.4 was introduced two new Extended Functions have been introduced, one standardising how HiSLIP, a standard published by the IVI Foundation in 2011, should be used on LXI products to provide faster control of instrumentation and a second Extended Function to provide a framework for supporting IPv6, an issue that will become more important as the use of IPv6 becomes more prevalent - and organisations specify Ethernet connected products should support it.

Since those additions to the specifications we have embarked on another major effort, the creation of Reference Design. This is the first time that a test and measurement standard has embarked on such an ambitious project, but given a very stable specification for instrument control based on the most widely interconnection standard – Ethernet – the LXI Consortium believes this to be in the best interest of both vendors and users of Ethernet controlled test equipment. It is time for a Reference Design.

What does a Reference Design do?

The Reference Design essentially will implement the core functions of the LXI Specification, it will provide “hooks” to vendor-specific hardware that implements the wanted instrumentation functions.

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Thanks to all our readers.
Bob Helsel, Editor
www.lxistandard.org

Keysight Technologies (formerly Agilent’s Electronic Measurement Group)
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