For more than 30 years, the General Purpose Interface Bus (GPIB) has been the standard communication interface between a controller and rack instruments, allowing test engineers to easily connect and control multiple devices from different vendors. The LXI standard, introduced in 2005, presents system integrators with a fast and efficient alternative for communicating with instruments.

LXI overcomes many of the limitations and cost inherent to GPIB. GPIB systems require special cables and controllers which add cost to the overall system. LXI systems based on LAN have an infrastructure comprised of low-cost, Ethernet cables and switches that are readily available in the consumer electronic industry. LXI instruments leverage all of the benefits of LAN technology. Unlike other bus technologies, an LXI-based test system can scale from a small network in a laboratory, all the way up to a distributed, global system connected to the Internet.Currently, LXI instruments are available with Ethernet speeds of 100 Mb/s and 1 Gb/s. The present Ethernet infrastructure features speeds up to 10 Gb/s and will be even faster in the future. Thanks to backward compatibility requirements, present day LXI instruments will continue to operate in the future as network speeds continue to increase. As a result of the increasing network speeds, LXI instruments have much faster block data transfer rates than instruments using slower buses such as GPIB. Some LXI instruments also support advanced intra-device synchronization and triggering mechanisms that improve test throughput efficiency.

Best of all, LXI devices integrate seamlessly into existing test systems that use GPIB or modular architectures such as VXI, PXI, PXI Express or AXIe. This allows you to migrate to LXI when you are ready.