From Steve Schink,
Chairman of the Board, LXI Consortium:

Welcome to the first issue of the LXI Newsletter in China!

Our intention is to share information with you on the LXI Standard and its many applications in the Test and Measurement marketplace. We also want to introduce you to the LXI Consortium, which has the mission of developing, maintaining and promoting the LXI Standard worldwide.

The LXI Consortium held its first meeting at the end of 2004 with a dozen T&M companies. It released Revision 1 of the LXI Specifications one year later and companies immediately started building LXI conformant instruments. LXI has become the fastest growing T&M standard since its inception, and we now have over 50 members worldwide. There are more than 2790 certified LXI products from 41 vendors in over 294 different product families.

For more information, go to www.lxistandard.org.

LXI for Everyone

Peter Plazotta
Founder and Chief Engineer,
TSEP

The LXI Consortium has been in existence for over 12 years, and we have had unprecedented Test and Measurement (T&M) industry success with the development and adoption of the LXI (LAN eXtensions for Instrumentation) Standard. 

Our vision for the future of the LXI Consortium is to maintain and expand the global adoption and utilization of the LXI standard by T&M instrument vendors and their customers. Global adoption and utilization of the LXI standard by instrument vendors will ensure a lower-cost, consistent, predictable and multi-vendor interoperable experience for our customers building network-based T&M test systems.

Recently, the LXI Consortium released the LXI Reference Design official 1.0 version for use by the LXI membership.  We are excited to be offering our current and future members what we believe is a T&M industry first, the source code and support for LXI Consortium members to implement the LXI Standard!

Read more>>

LXI is the LAN Standard for Test and Measurement

Every serious test interface makes bold claims about flexibility, scalability and performance—but only one extends the cost-effective power of LAN. LXI is the robust system backbone for today and tomorrow, and it lets you easily connect the system you need: big or small, local or remote. Thousands of instruments have passed LXI conformance testing, and every one of them lets you use the connection you already know. If you are designing new test systems or are upgrading an existing test system—consider LXI based instruments in your test plan.

Easily Connect the System You Need
LXI instruments use an intuitive Web interface making it fast and easy to connect and configure. You can simply open the instrument home page in any browser. The speed and simplicity of LXI works seamlessly in hybrid systems with test interfaces that include GPIB, VXI and PXI instruments. And, it’s easy to set up a simple local connection or use the corporate LAN with any type of Ethernet connection (100 Mb, 1Gb) and WLAN. You can go beyond the core standard with LXI Extended Functions on select instruments and achieve greater performance with hardware and LAN -based triggering and synchronization.

Read more >>

IVI Web Forum Question and Answer:
In general why IVI-C, IVI.COM or IVI.NET?

Answered by Kirk Fertitta, Pacific Mindworks
for the IVI Web Forum

Note:  Offering an IVI driver is a requirement for all LXI-conformant instruments.  The IVI Web Forum is hosted by the IVI Foundation.  You can sign up at www.ivifoundation.org.

This is a pretty involved topic – and a contentious one, but I’ll share what I tell folks when building an IVI strategy. The most important factor is considering the development environment (ADE) that your customers primarily work in.

Few would argue that IVI.NET provides the best end-user experience for those working in a .NET environment, such as C# or VB.NET.However, IVI-COM drivers include .NET interop assemblies (i.e. .NET “wrappers”) that have provided a very good .NET end-user experience for many years.IVI-C drivers don’t fare as well in .NET, as they require the use of somewhat tedious attributes to call into the native C DLL.There are some vendor-specific wrapper generation tools for IVI-C in .NET, but there is no IVI standard mechanism for doing this and interchangeability across vendors isn’t really supported with IVI-C.

Read more >>

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

Use the connection you already know!

New LXI Products

LXI Links