LAN EXtensions For Instrumentation - Industry Consortium

Industry Consortium

The LXI Consortium is a not-for-profit (501c3) corporation made up of test and measurement companies. The Consortium’s primary purpose is to promote the development and adoption of the LXI Standard, an open, accessible standard identifying specifications and solutions relating to the functional test, measurement, and data acquisition industry. The Consortium is open to all test and measurement companies, and participation by industry professionals, systems integrators, and government representatives is encouraged. The first Consortium meeting was held November 17–18, 2004. Membership is divided into four levels: Strategic (Agilent Technologies, Pickering Interfaces and Rohde & Schwarz), Participating, Advisory, and Informational.

Consortium members meet several times a year at PlugFests held around the world where conversations regarding the LXI Standard are discussed face-to-face meetings in working groups. The public is invited to attend tutorials intended for users and manufacturers interested in joining the LXI ranks. PlugFests keep LXI instrument manufacturers current with changes in the specification, test implementations. It also provides an opportunity for to certify new products as LXI conformant via an independent testing lab.

The Consortium’s standard development efforts are performed by volunteers working through a number of committees and technical working groups (WGs), which include Compliance WG, LAN and Web WG, Physical WG, Programmatic Interface WG, Resource Management WG, Specification Revisions, Technical Committee, and Timing and Synchronization.

In September 2005, the LXI Consortium released Version 1.0 of the LXI Standard. Just one year later, Version 1.1 followed with minor corrections and clarifications. In October 2007, the Consortium adopted Version 1.2; its major focus was discovery mechanisms. A discovery mechanism allows the test system to recognize and register a new instrument plugged into the system so the user and other instruments can work with it. Specifically, LXI 1.2 included enhancements to support plug-and-play identification of LXI devices. Version 1.3 incorporates the 2008 version of IEEE 1588 for synchronizing time among instruments, so systems using LXI Class A and Class B devices will synchronize with each other based on the 1588-2008 Precision Time Protocol (PTP) standard.

In addition to XML-based discovery, Version 2.0 of the Standard will incorporate even more significant changes. This functionality include the extension of LXI device Web pages to support instrument configuration and interactive testing of different LXI trigger capabilities such as LAN peer-to-peer messages, IEEE 1588 time events, or the wired trigger bus of LXI Class A devices. Logging of all the events in LXI devices will improve as will the ease of troubleshooting LXI-based test systems. Resource Management is another major extension that enables management and allocation of LXI devices in a network with more than one controller accessing instruments. Yet another working group is dealing with the standardization of script downloads into LXI devices. Execution of custom scripts can be done without the system controller, simplifying the development of test software and increasing the throughput of test systems. The most current version of the standard (Version 1.4) is available on the LXI Consortium’s website.