What is AXIe?

If you’ve ever dealt with someone who offers you AXIe-compatible products, you may face with the “AXIe” term, but not everyone knows what is it and where it can be used. You can find answers on all of these questions in this article. AXIe in the newest standard for high-quality test instrumentation creating. It’s something like PXI, VXI, but has its own features. AXIe stands for “Advanced Telecommunications Computing Architecture Extensions for Instrumentation and Test” and it’s based on bus standard. AXIe is performs as PXI in the most aspects, but it can be used for high power application because of larger board format support. Both of systems are open system, so they can work with modules and chassis from other manufacturers. Both of standards took as a basis PCI Express data fabric, low latency and high-speed bus. Data communication controller use the same drivers for PXI and AXIe — IVI or LabView. What is the main differences between PXI and AXIe? Let’s find out it below.

Module Size

Module size is the most important difference between AXI and PXIe. On picture above you can see that AXIe is very huge relative to PXI. AXI is about 12.7×11 inches and PXI 1.2×0.8 inches. Large module size and vent provides to up 200 watts while PXI can up only 30 watts.

In what purposes they can be used? AXIe can be used in all spheres, when it’s necessary convert data with high speed or use fast work digital applications. For example, it is very useful in military, aerospace, high-energy physics, etc. Nowadays, AXIe digitazers can work with speed about 40 Gb per second, arbitrary waveform generators up to 65Gb per second, and arbitrary waveform generators up to 65 Gb per second. Large construction provides AXIe high speed digital and microwave signals to remain on a single coplanar design to retain signal integrity and satisfactory cooling.

AXIe Chassis

Large modules require tall chassis, doesn’t it? No it isn’t. PXI chassis are 4U rack units, while AXIe only half of that, so second most important difference between AXIe and PXI is horizontal position of most PXI chassis.

AXIe chassis support 14 slots per mainframe. 2, 5 and 14 slots are the most common. Horizontal chassis position has some cooling advantages and AXIe large construction nice with it. Availability of 2-slot chaises is huge advantage, because users, who don’t want to find a lot of AXIe modules, can use it too. You can deploy two or one module with high efficiently. If application needs more AXIe modules, users can mix and match instruments in chassis with more than 2 slots.


AXIe is very similar to PXI, but the most important difference is sizes. This standard offers higher performance than PXI because of its large form factor. All PXI instruments are compatible with AXIe. There are chassis with different slots number. So this is great solution for test applications because of its performance, density, and scalability.