Ettus R. LLC was founded in 2004 to produce high quality, low cost
software radio systems, and bring these capabilities to everyone. In
the last five and a half years this company, which started in a garage,
has shipped thousands of products to users in over 67 countries. Those
products have been used for everything from mapping the earth, moon and
stars to tracking wildlife, from teaching signal processing to obtaining
a PhD., by everyone from individual hobbyists to huge research teams,
for communicating across a desk, under water, under ground, across town,
and around the world.
Today, as the next step in the growth of our company, we are very proud
to announce that Ettus R. has been acquired by National
Instruments Corporation (NI, http://www.ni.com). NI was founded in 1976
to transform the way engineers and scientists around the world design,
prototype, and deploy systems for test, control, and embedded design
applications.
Below you will find answers to some questions you may have about this
change.
What does this mean for Ettus R. LLC and its products?
For the most part, things will stay the same. We will continue to
operate separately from, but as a wholly-owned subsidiary of National
Instruments. Our web address, email, phone, and postal addresses will
all stay the same. All sales will continue to be direct. The
additional resources the acquisition provides us will help us to serve
you better and faster.
The USRP family of hardware for software radio will continue to be our
main product line, and it will continue to be actively developed and
improved. We have several exciting new products we are working on for
release later this year. We are also working on a new “Universal
Hardware Driver” or UHD, which will completely encapsulate everything
needed to control all of our hardware in a single driver. This will
enable software developers to use USRP hardware without having to worry
about the low level details of daughterboard control, kernel drivers, or
other factors. The UHD will be cross-platform, allowing use on Linux,
Windows, and Mac OS X.
What does this mean for GNU Radio?
Ettus R. will continue to support and contribute to GNU Radio,
and the combination of GNU Radio software and USRP hardware will remain
our core focus. The additional resources that a large company like NI
can provide will allow us to focus even more energy on improving the
overall capabilities of the system. Two of the core GNU Radio
developers, Matt E. and Josh B., are employed by Ettus R…
In the future we will also likely be providing GNU Radio drivers for
additional hardware from National Instruments.
What does this mean for LabVIEW?
The Universal Hardware Driver will allow us to produce high-quality,
officially supported LabVIEW drivers for all of our hardware. We hope
to have those drivers available in the coming months.
What does this mean for those using Simulink, OSSIE, OpenBTS, SCARI, or
other software with their USRP hardware?
Ettus R. is fully committed to enabling the use of USRP hardware
with any and every software platform for SDR. The UHD will ease both
the technical and the licensing hurdles which have made this somewhat
difficult in the past. We will be actively seeking input from the key
representatives of those communities in order to ensure that the UHD API
will fulfill their needs.
Will USRP hardware be sold through National Instruments?
In the short term, no, all sales will continue to be directly through
Ettus R., but in the longer term we may offer some or all products
through NI’s worldwide sales network as well.
In summary, we will continue to bring you high quality, low cost devices
for software radio systems, to enable you, our users, to create
exciting, groundbreaking radio communication systems.
If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask. Thank you for
your time and your support.
Matt E.
President, Ettus R. LLC
[email protected]