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PCI Express and PXI Express, which uses PCI Express signaling, provide the industry's highest bandwidth and best latency. PCI Express, an evolution of the PCI bus, maintains software compatibility with PCI but replaces the parallel bus with a high-speed (2.5 Gb/s) serial bus. PCI Express sends data through differential signal pairs called lanes, which offer 250 MB/s bandwidth per direction per lane. Multiple lanes can be grouped together with typical lane widths of x1 (pronounced "by one"), x4, x8, and x16, and, unlike PCI, which shares bandwidth with all devices on the bus, each PCI Express device receives dedicated bandwidth. By taking advantage of PCI Express technology in the backplane, PXI Express increases the available PXI bandwidth from 132 MB/s to 6 GB/s for a more than 45X improvement in bandwidth while still maintaining software and hardware compatibility with PXI modules.
The following demonstrations show the advantages of PCI Express and PXI Express bandwidth and the benefits of this high throughput.
NI Week 2005 SawStop Video
Watch the power of PCI Express bandwidth as the NI PCIe-1430 frame grabber records the safety response of a table saw in a SawStop system. Using NI CompactRIO, this system detects when an operator contacts the spinning blade and responds by automatically stopping and retracting the blade in milliseconds. With high-speed image acquisition in PCI Express, you can easily see how the saw retracts once the system detects the operator is too close to the blade.SawStop Video 300k
SawStop Video 100k
SawStop Video 56k
NI Week 2004 PCI Express Image Acquisition Video
View the world's first PCI Express frame grabber, the NI PCIe-1429, as it records a water balloon exploding at 1000 frames/s. With the high bandwidth of PCI Express, the NI PCIe-1429 allows engineers and scientists to acquire images at the highest speeds, resolutions and bit depths to perform demanding imaging applications such as synchronized data and image acquisition, fault analysis and advanced motion tracking.
PCI Express Image Acquisition Video
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