USRP E100 Product Announcement

GNU Radio
1

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Ettus R. Product Announcement
November 22nd, 2010

1> USRP E100 Now on Sale
2> USRP N210 Shipping Early
3> SDR’10 Conference and GNU Radio Meeting

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1> USRP E100 Now on Sale

We are pleased to introduce another new addition to the USRP family of
products. The USRP E100 software radio is an embedded stand-alone
system powered by the combination of a Gumstix Overo board with 720 MHz
OMAP3 (containing both an ARM Cortex A8 processor & TI C64x+ DSP) and a
Xilinx Spartan 3A-DSP1800 FPGA.

The USRP E100 series runs a full distribution of Linux enabling both
development and deployment without the need for a host computer.
The analog baseband is has dual 64 MS/s 12-bit ADCs, and dual 128 MS/s
14-bit DACs.

Other exciting new features:

  • Works with all of our daughterboards

  • Flexible clocking – The user can choose (at run time) a convenient
    clock rate, which is typically a multiple of the symbol time. For
    example, the user can set the clock to 52 MHz for GSM applications,
    61.44 MHz for UMTS, or 64 MHz for general purpose applications.

  • An on-board TCXO keeps the master clock and RF signals within a
    couple of parts per million.

  • The master reference can be locked to an external 5 or 10 MHz
    reference

  • The large Spartan 3A DSP FPGA allows for accelerating significant
    parts of the signal flow

  • The UHD drivers work on the USRP E100, so existing UHD-enabled
    applications should work out-of-the-box.

  • USRP 2.0 Host and On-The-Go ports, for keyboard and mouse, or extra
    storage

  • Ethernet (10/100 Mbps) networking

  • HDMI Video output for hooking up a monitor

  • Audio in and out for voice applications

The introductory price for the USRP E100 is $1300, and shipments will
start in mid December.

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2> USRP N210 Shipping Early

The recently announced USRP N210 will be shipping in early December,
about 2 weeks earlier than expected.

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3> SDR’10 Conference and GNU Radio Meeting

The SDR’10 Conference will be held from November 30th through December
3rd. Like last year, Ettus R. will be sponsoring a GNU Radio
Meeting, which will now be a formal part of the program on Wed December
1st. You do not need to attend the rest of the conference to attend
this meeting.

 http://conference.wirelessinnovation.org

Ettus R. will also have a booth in the Expo area of the
conference, and we will be demonstrating both the USRP E100 and N210.

===========================================================================

Thanks for your time,
Matt E.
President, Ettus R. LLC

2

On 11/22/2010 9:29 PM, Matt E. wrote:

The USRP E100 series runs a full distribution of Linux enabling both
development and deployment without the need for a host computer.
The analog baseband is has dual 64 MS/s 12-bit ADCs, and dual 128 MS/s
14-bit DACs.

What sort of connection exists between the Overo and the rest of the
system (e.g. is this using USB, high speed serial, etc.?)? In
particular what sort of bandwidth is possible from the
ADC->FPGA->Gumstix. Obviously the larger FPGA allows for some extra
signal processing to be done before the gumstix, but does the gumstix
then see the mainboard as an USRP1-like source (i.e. 16-bit samples @
8MS/s), or is the bandwidth/bits-per-sample easily adjustable?

The introductory price for the USRP E100 is $1300, and shipments will
start in mid December.

Exciting!

Thanks for your time,
Matt E.
President, Ettus R. LLC

Thanks,
Doug

–
Doug G.
[email protected]

3

On Nov 23, 2010, at 7:53 PM, Douglas G. wrote:

Xilinx Spartan 3A-DSP1800 FPGA.

What sort of connection exists between the Overo and the rest of the
system (e.g. is this using USB, high speed serial, etc.?)? In
particular what sort of bandwidth is possible from the
ADC->FPGA->Gumstix. Obviously the larger FPGA allows for some extra
signal processing to be done before the gumstix, but does the gumstix
then see the mainboard as an USRP1-like source (i.e. 16-bit samples @
8MS/s), or is the bandwidth/bits-per-sample easily adjustable?

I too would like to know what type of connectivity is used to interface
with the Overo. The fastest possible interface would probably be using
its GPMC controller to interface with the FPGA, but on the Overo COMs
not all the pins required are exposed, I think.

The other options would be SPI or USB.

Elvis D.

4

On 11/23/2010 07:53 AM, Douglas G. wrote:

What sort of connection exists between the Overo and the rest of the
system (e.g. is this using USB, high speed serial, etc.?)? In
particular what sort of bandwidth is possible from the
ADC->FPGA->Gumstix. Obviously the larger FPGA allows for some extra
signal processing to be done before the gumstix,

We use the General Purpose Memory Controller (GPMC) bus which is a
parallel memory bus. We have written a kernel module device driver for
it, which the UHD talks to.

As for bandwidth, we currently get about 20 MB/s, which gives you about
4-5 MHz of RF bandwidth at 16 bit samples. This has not been optimized
at all, so I wouldn’t be surprised to get 50% more with a bit of tuning,
but I can’t promise anything.

The other thing to keep in mind is what you do with these samples in the
Overo. While the OMAP3 is a very capable processor, its performance is
nothing like today’s laptop computer. If you are pushing high data
rates, to really get the most out of the system you’ll want to migrate
some processing to either the FPGA or to the C64x+ DSP.

but does the gumstix
then see the mainboard as an USRP1-like source (i.e. 16-bit samples @
8MS/s), or is the bandwidth/bits-per-sample easily adjustable?

You would instantiate a UHD source and/or sink in your code, and so it
would look like any of our other devices. Using other sample sizes,
like 8 bits per sample is possible, but will take a little bit of FPGA
tweaking. The nice thing is that because we are using a common FPGA and
driver base across the USRP2, USRP N210, and USRP E100, the same tweaks
will work across all of them.

Matt

5

On 11/23/2010 08:00 AM, Elvis D. wrote:

I too would like to know what type of connectivity is used to
interface with the Overo. The fastest possible interface would
probably be using its GPMC controller to interface with the FPGA, but
on the Overo COMs not all the pins required are exposed, I think.

GPMC is used for all the high-speed interfacing, and all the pins we
need are exposed on the Overo connectors.

The other options would be SPI or USB.

USB goes to our front panel for user access. SPI is used for loading
the FPGA and other misc applications.

Matt

6

On 11/23/2010 09:42 AM, Elvis D. wrote:

Hi Matt,

On Nov 23, 2010, at 9:08 PM, Matt E. wrote:

GPMC is used for all the high-speed interfacing, and all the pins
we need are exposed on the Overo connectors.

http://www.gumstix.net/Hardware/view/I/O-connectors-cabling/Gumstix-Overo-70-pin-connector-J4-features-Extended-Memory-Bus-and-MMC-signals/112.html

Can you tell me which pins are used from the above connector list?

Everything that starts with “EM_”

Do you have a link to a patch or git repo containing the linux kernel
module driver that talks to the UHD?

Yes, we are setting up public repos now.

Matt

7

Hi Matt,

On Nov 23, 2010, at 9:08 PM, Matt E. wrote:

GPMC is used for all the high-speed interfacing, and all the pins we need are
exposed on the Overo connectors.

http://www.gumstix.net/Hardware/view/I/O-connectors-cabling/Gumstix-Overo-70-pin-connector-J4-features-Extended-Memory-Bus-and-MMC-signals/112.html

Can you tell me which pins are used from the above connector list?

Do you have a link to a patch or git repo containing the linux kernel
module driver that talks to the UHD?

Best regards,

Elvis D.

8

On Nov 23, 2010, at 10:04 PM, Matt E. wrote:

Can you tell me which pins are used from the above connector list?

Everything that starts with “EM_”

Now I remember, when using the Overo with the Gumstix expansion boards
(e.g. Palo43 or Chestnut43), not all the GPMC pins were available on the
40-pin expansion header (SV-1), requiring the development of a custom
expansion board to utilize the GPMC connectors, which is the route that
you’ve taken. Great!

Elvis D.

9

I would like to know a bit more detail regarding the product.

  1. It seems like USRP E100 is coming with a TI OMAP board. What is
    the memory configuration?

Yes, the Overo board is included in the price. It has 512 MB of RAM and
a 4 GB microSD card.

  1. Is everything on one PCB?

The Gumstix Overo is a separate PCB which plugs on to the E100
motherboard. It comes to you already installed.

A picture of the product or prototype will be better for me to
understand better.

It will be posted on our web page later today.

Thanks,
Matt

10

On Tue, Nov 23, 2010 at 1:04 PM, Matt E. [email protected] wrote:

On 11/23/2010 09:42 AM, Elvis D. wrote:

Do you have a link to a patch or git repo containing the linux kernel
module driver that talks to the UHD?

Yes, we are setting up public repos now.

Matt

Matt,
Any status update on this? I see the usrpe1xx project in redmine on
code.e.c, but it looks like that currently only houses a Wiki page
with not repo up yet.
Thanks,
Doug

–
Doug G.
[email protected]

11

On 02/09/2011 10:53 AM, Douglas G. wrote:

Matt,
Any status update on this? I see the usrpe1xx project in redmine on
code.e.c, but it looks like that currently only houses a Wiki page
with not repo up yet.

You can find the OpenEmbedded overlay for building images for the E100
here:

git clone git://code.ettus.com/ettus/ettus_oe.git

Look in recipes/linux for the kernel recipe. The patches for the driver
are there.

Philip

12

Dear Matt,

I have some problems about the maximum recieve rate of usrp e100. I
have written a c++ program based on UHD. when I set recieve rate of e100
as 4Msamples/second or bigger, i find that the overrun sign “0” always
appears even I do nothing with those samples besides recieving them. As
far as I know, cpu of e100 is 720MHz,so it is possible to cope the data
rate which is bigger than 4Msamples per second.

Leo