National Instruments Network Card Cabled PCI Express User Manual

Cabled PCI Express as a Standard  
Interface for Virtual and Synthetic  
Instruments  
Overview  
Cabled PCI Express is a cabled serial bus used for high-performance interconnect of system components. It is based on  
PCI Express and so provides a scalable, high-bandwidth, low-latency bus. In measurement and automation, cabled PCI  
Express is very appealing to high-performance applications using a host PC for measurement processing and analysis.  
For example, cabled PCI Express is currently used to connect a host PC to a PXI (PCI eXtensions for Instrumentation)  
chassis with sustained transfer rates of nearly 800 Mbytes/s. The high performance, low cost, and easy connectivity of  
cabled PCI Express makes it ideal for a number of measurement applications, and therefore, its applications is expected  
to expand to serve more applications in the future. This paper examines cabled PCI express technology and both its  
current and future application in measurement and automation systems.  
What Is Cabled PCI Express?  
Cabled PCI Express is the next generation peripheral bus for servers, desktops, and laptops. Cabled PCI Express will  
have the following advantages:  
Wide use in standard PCs means low implementation costs  
High bandwidth – 4 Gigabytes / second  
Low latency – 300-700 nanoseconds  
Application software and operating systems run without changes due to no software changes from PCI model  
At least 15 standardized form factors including cabled PCI Express  
Only standard that is designed for chip-to-chip, board-to-board, and box-to-box applications  
Cabled PCI Express is being defined by the PCI-SIG standards body as an extension of the PCI Express Base  
specification. Extending PCI Express from box-to-box and over longer distances is the goal of cabled PCI Express.  
Cabled PCI Express provides a simple yet high-performance bus for expanding PC and measurement I/O. Some  
commercial applications of cabled PCI Express include interfaces on laptop or small form factor PC to connect  
peripherals to laptops and split-system desktop PCs that can move the CPU box under the desk while keeping user I/O  
easily accessible on top of it. The cabled PCI Express specification anticipates cables up to 7 meters long and still meet  
the PCI Express timing requirements. It is nearing completion with the final release expected in the fall of 2006.  
Products Available  
National Instruments, as a leading innovator in applying commercial technology to test and measurement applications,  
provides a line of remote controllers to connect VXI and PXI chassis to PCs, called MXI (Multiplatform eXtensions for  
Instrumentation). The first MXI product, MXI-1, was used to connect VXI mainframes to PCs in 1991. The latest  
products, MXI Express, use cabled PCI Express to connect a PXI chassis to a host PC. MXI Express remote controllers  
are available now in x1 to connect to a PXI chassis and x4 configurations provide up to nearly 800 MB/s of sustained  
throughput to PXI Express chassis. There is both a PCIe (see Figure 1) and ExpressCard (see Figure 2) host interface  
for use with desktops and laptops, respectively. The primary purpose of using cabled PCI Express in MXI Express was  
to take advantage of the higher performance, form factor options and lower costs of PCI Express.  
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Cabled PCI Express as a Standard  
Interface for Virtual and Synthetic  
Instruments  
Figure 2. NI MXI Express uses cabled PCI Express to connect a Laptop with ExpressCard to PXI  
When MXI-1 first launched in 1991 it provided 10MB/s bandwidth. This was state-of-the-art and used commercial  
technologies available at that time (see Figure 3). By incorporating cabled PCI Express into the MXI product line can  
now sustain nearly 800 MB/s.  
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Figure 3. Cabled PCI Express makes MXI Express 80X higher bandwidth than MXI-1  
While bandwidth has dramatically increased, the costs of these links have decreased. Figure 4 shows how the price per  
bandwidth has dropped significantly over the last 15 years.  
Figure 4: From $450/MB/s to $2.25/MB/s – Cabled PCI Express Helps Decrease Price per Bandwidth  
MXI Express x1 for PXI chassis cut the cost per MB/s in half from $19/MB/s to $9/MB/s. MXI Express x4 for PXI  
Express chassis cut that further to $2.25/MB/s. The cost reductions show the power of adopting commercial  
technologies and ensure that PXI-based virtual instrumentation will continue to grow into more price sensitive  
applications.  
Software-centric Synthetic and Virtual Instrumentation  
Because cabled PCI Express was designed for box-to-box applications it can connect a PC to traditional instruments. As  
the trend for more software-centric instrumentation increases, the need for a high-speed connection to a host processor  
is even more important. The US Department of Defense, for example, has coined a term called synthetic  
instrumentation, to describe these software-centric systems. The DoD has created a forum called the Synthetic  
Instrument Working Group (SIWG) who’s role is to define standards for interoperability of synthetic instrument  
systems. The SIWG defines synthetic instruments (SI) as:  
A reconfigurable system that links a series of elemental hardware and software components with standardized  
interfaces to generate signals or make measurements using numeric processing techniques.  
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Cabled PCI Express as a Standard  
Interface for Virtual and Synthetic  
Instruments  
The focus of the SIWG has been primarily on the SI concepts as applied to RF stimulus and measurement systems. Data  
intensive applications, like RF testing, require a high-bandwidth, low-latency bus to connect the IF digitizers to the  
processor (see Figure 5).  
Figure 5. Synthetic Instrument RF Block Diagram  
For example, to digitize a 50 MHz wide RF signal requires 100 Mbytes/s of bandwidth (at 2 bytes of resolution per  
sample). For an input and output channel, this grows to 200 MB/s. And for increasingly common multi-channel, or  
MIMO (Multi Input, Multi Output) applications, the bandwidth required can quickly scale to multiply gigabytes per  
second. PCI Express, and cabled PCI Express in particular, is a leading contender for this high speed link because of its  
excellent technical capabilities, wide commercial adoption, and low-cost infrastructure.  
Cabled PCI Express is based on PCI Express and so provides a scalable, high-bandwidth, low-latency bus for  
chip-to-chip, board-to-board, and box-to-box applications. In the past some data intensive applications couldn’t transfer  
the data fast enough to the host PC and so the data was processed in the box instrument using vendor-defined software  
and hardware. Cabled PCI Express opens up a new larger and faster pipe to the host PC so more applications can take  
advantage of user-defined software and hardware for measurement processing and analysis. Today NI uses cabled PCI  
Express to connect host PCs to PXI chassis with MXI Express. It currently sustains transfer rates of 110 MB/s for a x1  
link and 798 MB/s for a x4 link. In the future, cabled PCI Express may offer a compelling bus solution for synthetic  
instrumentation.  
Relevant NI Products and Whitepapers  
National Instruments, a leader in automated test, is committed to providing the hardware and software products  
engineers need to create these next generation test systems.  
Software:  
Hardware:  
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Whitepapers  
NI offers a Designing Next Generation Test Systems Developers Guide. This guide is collection of whitepapers  
designed to help you develop test systems that lower your cost, increase your test throughput, and can scale with future  
requirements. To read the entire developers guide, you can: Download the PDF (90+ page) version or view the  
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