{"id":27945,"date":"2020-09-01T13:00:44","date_gmt":"2020-09-01T20:00:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.digilentinc.com\/?p=27945"},"modified":"2020-12-21T11:11:02","modified_gmt":"2020-12-21T19:11:02","slug":"interested-in-sdr","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/digilent.com\/blog\/interested-in-sdr\/","title":{"rendered":"Interested in Software-Defined Radio? We are!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Before I took on my role at Digilent, I was an RF engineer at NI (the company that acquired Digilent some years ago). While at NI, I worked on some really complex, fascinating RF instruments. The hardware was awesome! But it was also expensive. Like, really <\/em>expensive<\/a>. Some instruments alone started at around $75,000 and a full test system might include several of them! (Not to mention the embedded controller to operate the system and the chassis to fit it all in, which is another $10,000+).<\/p>\n

The price is justified for the quality and performance, but it would be overkill for software-defined radio<\/a> (SDR). Also, what if you\u2019re not a certain trillion-dollar fruit company and looking for something more friendly to your wallet? Well, check this out!<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a cool company called Ettus Research<\/a> that brings together quality hardware and a robust open-source community. (Ettus is also an NI brand, so it\u2019s basically Digilent\u2019s SDR cousin.) Ettus introduced the world to the USRP platform (USRP = Universal Software Radio Peripheral). The USRP family of products is designed for RF applications from DC to 6 GHz, including multiple-antenna (MIMO) systems. Example application areas include white spaces, mobile phones, public safety, spectrum monitoring, radio networking, cognitive radio, satellite navigation, and amateur radio.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve been hearing some interest in RF and SDR from quite a few of our customers, and so we wanted to bring you all something new!<\/p>\n

I\u2019m happy to announce that the Ettus USRP B205mini-i is now available in the Digilent store<\/a>! This flexible and compact platform is ideal for both hobbyist and OEM applications. It provides a wide frequency range from 70 MHz to 6 GHz and a user-programmable, industrial-grade Xilinx Spartan-6 XC6SLX150 FPGA. The RF front end uses the Analog Devices AD9364 RFIC transceiver with 56 MHz of instantaneous bandwidth. The board is bus-powered by a high-speed USB 3.0 connection for streaming data to the host computer.<\/p>\n

The USRP B205mini-i also includes connectors for GPIO, JTAG, and synchronization with a 10 MHz clock reference or PPS time reference input signal. The USRP Hardware Driver™ (UHD) provides a C and Python API that enables users to efficiently develop applications then seamlessly transition designs between platforms as requirements expand.<\/p>\n

Available now for an introductory price of $746.00 ($100 off!)<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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Will Wadkins, Digilent’s FPGA Product Manager, discusses how Digilent is beginning to enter the software-defined radio space with the introduction of the USRP B205mini-i.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":27947,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4267,35,4324],"tags":[1662,156],"ppma_author":[4467],"class_list":["post-27945","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured","category-fpga","category-research-rapid-prototyping","tag-fpga","tag-new-product-2"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/digilent.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/09\/USRP_B200mini_Front_Diagonal_Large_2.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"authors":[{"term_id":4467,"user_id":16,"is_guest":0,"slug":"wwadkins","display_name":"William Wadkins","avatar_url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/f23af17e3f0aa5cdce4db10c96eb005614c30853a9579a999104e070cf86df4c?s=96&d=mm&r=g","1":"","2":"","3":"","4":"","5":"","6":"","7":"","8":"","9":"","10":""}],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/digilent.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27945","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/digilent.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/digilent.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digilent.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/16"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digilent.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27945"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/digilent.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27945\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digilent.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/27947"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/digilent.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27945"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digilent.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27945"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digilent.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27945"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digilent.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ppma_author?post=27945"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}