Joint initiative

BAE Systems, National Instruments and Phase Matrix (PMI) have announced a joint initiative to develop a PXI Express-based synthetic instrument for military and commercial RF and microwave applications.

PMI is currently developing a 100 kHz to 26.5 GHz family of downconverter modules in a 3U PXI Express-compatible format to support PXI RF and microwave applications. BAE Systems plans to build a next-generation synthetic instrument based on the downconverter module family, using NI PXI Express chassis, controllers and intermediate frequency digitiser modules as well as LabVIEW software for host and FPGA-based signal processing.

Synthetic instrumentation, a subset of virtual instrumentation, combines modular hardware such as upconverters, downconverters, digitisers and high-speed I/O with a software platform to create user-defined test and measurement systems.

The synthetic instrument under development could make it possible for engineers to stream high bandwidth RF and microwave data across the high-speed PXI Express bus directly to a processor for application-specific analysis.

Using a software-based approach with general-purpose hardware, synthetic instrumentation provides engineers and scientists with the flexibility to emulate multiple traditional instruments and add new functionality over time to support future needs and technologies.