The 42-927 PXI chassis from Pickering Interfaces saves test-rack space by accepting up to 20 PXI or PXIe instruments and switch cards.

No matter how many instruments they hold, large, automated test systems always take up too much floor space. While test racks may have increased in density since the PXI bus was introduced in 1997, there’s always a need to pack more test equipment into less space. That’s where the 42-927 PXI chassis from Pickering Interfaces can help.

Packing 21 slots into the usual 4U-height PXI chassis, the 42-927, provides 20 slots for instruments. The backplane for those instrument slots can support either a parallel bus PXI or serial-bus PXI Express (PXIe) instrument card in any slot. Why hybrid slots? Because many instrument cards still in production today use the original PXI bus, automated test racks often remain in service for more than a decade.

With test racks in service for such long periods of time, they often outlive their power supplies and cooling fans. That’s why the 42-927 chassis has removable power supplies and even a removable rear panel. That lets you easily replace cooling fans and power supplies without having to remove or replace the entire chassis from its rack.

The chassis operates over a temperature range of 0°C to 55°C. It has a cooling capacity of 100 W up to 40°C and 80 W above that temperature. Dual 900 W power supplies provide DC outputs of 3.3 V (65 A), 5V (30 A), 5V aux (3 A), 12 V (125 A) and -12 V (2 A).

The leftmost chassis slot is a PXIe slot for the system controller. The 43-920 single-slot controller supports a throughput of 14 Gbytes/s. Its processor is an Intel Core I5 11th Gen processor. It has a 1 Tbyte m.2 NVME SSD and 32 Gbyte DDR4 of RAM. It’s compliant with PXI-5 Rev. 2.0. The controller provides you with three USB Type-A host ports (the test business moves slowly when adopting the latest consumer technology) and two Ethernet ports.