Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] [USRP-users] FPGA devkit using HSMC/FMC RF board?

[Tomas Daujotas]

Hi,

Paralella has Z7010 plus 16 core microprocessor and costs 99USD only.
Too bad we need to wait to order it.
http://www.adapteva.com/parallella-board/

This one is very interesting, but can GNURadio bits run on the Epiphany chip?

I will answer a typical engineering answer: it depends. Since Linux runs there, the GNURadio can be compiled on the system itself and should run fine. However I won't give my hand to cut off on a bet, tests are needed for this.

 

I am mostly familiar with Altera, so its SoCKIT costs 299USD, but it has
a huuuge FPGA (115k LEs) and in addition to above ones, it has VGA out
and audio out:
http://www.rocketboards.org/foswiki/Documentation/ArrowSoCKitEvaluationBoard
There's also DE1-SoC, which has a slightly smaller 85k LEs FPGA:
http://www.terasic.com.tw/cgi-bin/page/archive.pl?Language=English&CategoryNo=167&No=836&PartNo=1

The problem with the FPGA approach is that none of Xilinx's tools are open source, and they are usually not free of cost and often require a Windows based environment...

None of FPGA vendors tools are open source: Altera, Microsemi, Lattice or Xilinx. However I've only been working with Altera or Xilinx and both, Quartus and ISE, runs on Linux. Using FPGA means that we will have to deal with the tools problem. On the other hand - they have free versions.

 

    What do you have in mind in term of specs, number of rx/tx, ...?


Bandwidth, MSPS, no of RX/TX and other parameters. Well, it's basically
choosing a transceiver or a pair of ADC and DAC.

Do you have any figure in mind? What's your target price? How would this project compares to, say: http://myriadrf.org/projects/ or http://sdr.osmocom.org/trac/

I have no target price. I presume the target price could arise here in community discussions. There's also an idea to make a bridge between HSMC/FMC and USRP daughter boards, so the bridge would consist ADC and DAC, but we would need to buy USRP daughter boards. Still many space for discussing. E.g. I would like to have frequencies down to 20MHz and catch up with CB radio guys @ 27MHz, on the other side it would be nice to capture some packets of WiFi. A very broad range, however there's no simple solution to cover all of this.

BR
Tomas Daujotas