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External Interfaces For PCI Express
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External Interfaces For PCI Express
BANGALORE, INDIA: Since the invention of GPIB in the 1960s, automated test systems have relied on PCs to provide the central control for instrumentation hardware and to automate testing procedures.
PCs in various form factors, such as desktops, workstations, and industrial and embedded systems, have been used for this purpose. They offer a variety of interface buses, such as USB, Ethernet, serial, GPIB, PCI, and PCI Express, to interface instrumentation hardware in automated test systems.
As PCs play a critical role in an automated test system, the test and measurement industry must track the progression of the PC industry and exploit any new technologies for increasing capabilities and performance while lowering the cost of test.
Over the last 10 years, PCs have evolved rapidly in many different ways. As predicted by Moore's law, CPU processing capabilities have increased by over 75 times in the past decade. Besides the dramatic increase in the processing capabilities, another significant trend has been the emergence of serial communication interfaces and the demise of parallel communication interfaces.
PCI Express has replaced PCI, AT, and ISA as the default internal system bus for interfacing peripheral system devices to the CPU. The PCI Special Interest Group (PCI-SIG), the consortium that owns and manages PCI specifications, announced in November 2011 that approximately 24 billion lanes of PCI Express have been shipped in the marketplace since its introduction in 2004, which is a strong testament to its adoption.
Similarly, for external interfaces, serial buses such as USB and Ethernet have replaced the parallel port, SCSI, and other parallel communication buses. A market research report published by In-Stat in 2010 expects that by 2012, the number of wired USB-enabled devices shipped will exceed 4 billion. With the proliferation of wireless communications standards such as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, another recently emerging trend is the consolidation of external physical interfaces on PCs.
The PCI Express bus, used in different implementations, will likely become the interface of choice for automated test systems. Offering the ideal combination of high data bandwidth and low latency, PCI Express is an extremely pervasive technology since it is a fundamental element of every PC. It has also started to blur the boundaries between a system bus, used for interfacing local devices within a system, and an interface bus, used for interfacing external peripheral devices to the system, and will likely continue to dissolve this delineation.
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