nuand bladerf Overview Ryan Tucker W2XH rtucker@gmail.com September 13, 2013 Rochester VHF Group This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA. This PDF was published to http://drop.hoopycat.com/bladerf_overview_web.pdf on September 16, 2013.
Outline SDR Introduction bladerf in a Nutshell Hardware Architecture Software Architecture In The Works Demonstration September 13, 2013 Rochester VHF Group 2
SDR Introduction September 13, 2013 Rochester VHF Group 3
Software-Defined Radio? Wikipedia definition: A radio communications system where components that have been typically implemented in hardware (e.g. mixers, filters, amplifiers, modulators / demodulators, detectors, etc.) are instead implemented by means of software on a personal computer or embedded system. September 13, 2013 Rochester VHF Group 4
SDR Applications Military JTRS Commercial Femtocells Whitespace radios Amateur FlexRadio DVB-T USB (RTL2834U) QtRadio / glsdr September 13, 2013 Rochester VHF Group 5
Trends IC manufacturers developing all-in-one RF transceivers Digital-to-RF & RF-to-Digital converters FPGA companies releasing products with DSP blocks, hard ARM processor cores, more RAM, etc September 13, 2013 Rochester VHF Group 6
Trends Wider bandwidths Higher sample Costs go down Capabilities increase rates Faster pipes September 13, 2013 Rochester VHF Group 7
bladerf in a Nutshell September 13, 2013 Rochester VHF Group 8
The bladerf September 13, 2013 Rochester VHF Group 9
The bladerf http://www.nuand.com/bladerf Professional Quality, Amateur Price Development was funded via Kickstarter 30 days, 501 backers, $191,422 pledged of $100,000 goal Launched by a group of software, hardware, and RF engineers with years of industry experience September 13, 2013 Rochester VHF Group 10
Basic Specs 300 MHz to 3800 MHz 28 MHz bandwidth USB 3.0 interface September 13, 2013 Rochester VHF Group 11
bladerf Pricing $420 or $650 Two FPGA sizes: 40 kle, 115 kle GPIO Expansion Board: $50 HF/VHF Transverter: $150 September 13, 2013 Rochester VHF Group 12
Hardware Architecture September 13, 2013 Rochester VHF Group 13
bladerf System September 13, 2013 Rochester VHF Group 14
bladerf System RF FX3 USB FPGA September 13, 2013 Rochester VHF Group 15
Schematic September 13, 2013 Rochester VHF Group 16
RF Components September 13, 2013 Rochester VHF Group 17
RF Components RF Switch Baluns RX RF Transceiver IC TX September 13, 2013 Rochester VHF Group 18
RF Components One IC contains the LNA, PA driver, RX/TX mixers, RX/TX filters, synthesizers, RX gain control, TX power control, DAC and ADC Instant RF: Just add baluns September 13, 2013 Rochester VHF Group 19
RX Schematic September 13, 2013 Rochester VHF Group 20
LMS6002D Block Diagram September 13, 2013 Rochester VHF Group 21
RF Specifications From the Lime Micro LMS6002D datasheet: Frequency range: 300 to 3800 MHz Baseband bandwidth: 0.75 to 14 MHz Frequency resolution: 2.4 Hz TX supply current (max gain): 280 ma RX supply current (max gain): 220 ma TX output power (CW): 6 dbm RX damage power: 23 dbm RX LNA1 Frequency range: 0.3 to 2.8 GHz Noise figure: 3.5 db at 0.95 GHz RX LNA2 Frequency range: 1.5 to 3.8 GHz Noise figure: 5.5 db at 1.95 GHz DAC/ADC 12-bit I/Q multiplex, 40 MHz ENOB (Effective Number of Bits): 10 bits September 13, 2013 Rochester VHF Group 22
Altera Cyclone IV FPGA September 13, 2013 Rochester VHF Group 23
Altera Cyclone IV FPGA At the heart of the bladerf Interfaces to: FX3 Microcontroller LMS6002D Transceiver Si5338 clock generator VCTCXO trim DAC GPIO expansion header NMEA input from GPS (with 1 pps input) Reference clock input Embedded memory, hard multipliers, DSP capability,... September 13, 2013 Rochester VHF Group 24
Cypress FX3 Microcontroller September 13, 2013 Rochester VHF Group 25
Cypress FX3 Microcontroller Streams data to and from the FPGA via GPIF II, a 100 MHz 32-bit interface Streams data to and from the host via USB 3.0, at up to 5 Gb/s! September 13, 2013 Rochester VHF Group 26
Software Architecture September 13, 2013 Rochester VHF Group 27
Three Major Components FPGA Orchestrate entire platform FX3 Interface host computer to FPGA Program the FPGA on power-up (soon) Host libraries Allow user applications to talk to bladerf September 13, 2013 Rochester VHF Group 28
Some Developers Damiano Bolla: si5338 sample rate readback, misc. bugfixes Robert Ghilduta: Project maintainer Mike Kershaw: CLI bug fixes Brian Padalino: Project maintainer Marco Schwan: OSX build fixes Jon Szymaniak: Project maintainer Ryan Tucker: Documentation, FPGA build automation September 13, 2013 Rochester VHF Group 29
Github Stats As of Sep 11 (commit 3d91831170): 423 commits 12 contributors 61% C, 23% VHDL, 9% Verilog, 6% Tcl, 1% Other 26 open issues, 69 closed issues September 13, 2013 Rochester VHF Group 30
Github Stats September 13, 2013 Rochester VHF Group 31
Github Stats Not a working-hours project! September 13, 2013 Rochester VHF Group 32
Github Stats September 13, 2013 Rochester VHF Group 33
Organization firmware_common Common source and headers between firmware and host #defines, structs, etc... fx3_firmware Cypress FX3 firmware Sets up USB 3.0 interfaces: Cyclone IV FPGA loader RF link with LMS6002D via FPGA Control interface (SPI, Si5338 programming, VCTCXO,...) hdl Source HDL and build scripts for IP blocks and platform top-levels Mix-and-match various IP and capabilities to do what you want Instantiates a Nios II for SPI control host Libraries and drivers for accessing the bladerf Uses libusb for Linux/OSX/Windows libbladerf is cross-platform, and will also work on the Nios II for headless use September 13, 2013 Rochester VHF Group 34
Building Firmware: Cypress FX3 SDK Free download FPGA: Altera Quartus II Web Edition is free Host: Your usual build chain September 13, 2013 Rochester VHF Group 35
Not Building Firmware and FPGA images available for download Official releases http://nuand.com/fx3/ http://nuand.com/fpga/ Unofficial instant builds http://hoopycat.com/bladerf_builds/ September 13, 2013 Rochester VHF Group 36
Third-Party Applications GNURadio De facto SDR standard Using gr-osmosdr module Compile/Install libbladerf, then use the build-gnuradio script September 13, 2013 Rochester VHF Group 37
Third-Party Applications OpenBTS Port in progress Software-based GSM access point September 13, 2013 Rochester VHF Group 38
In the Works September 13, 2013 Rochester VHF Group 39
To do: urgent Improve the software USB flakiness Broken demos Documentation Tutorials September 13, 2013 Rochester VHF Group 40
Planned Add-On HF/VHF Transverter... a block up-down converter that greatly expands the bladerf s lower frequency range. The expansion board s targeted high fidelity frequency is 50 MHz, however the transverter can be tuned as low as 10 MHz, making the platform suitable for HF/VHF applications. September 13, 2013 Rochester VHF Group 41
Demonstration September 13, 2013 Rochester VHF Group 42
More Information http://www.nuand.com/bladerf/ https://github.com/nuand/bladerf/ http://gnuradio.org/ #bladerf on irc.freenode.net Media Credits: R. Tucker (all bladerf photos), nuand LLC (Schematic, RX Schematic), Lime Micro (LMS6002D Block Diagram), github (Github Stats) Thanks: Brian Padalino, David Taubman, Dr. Greg Pettis, Dawn Lepard KC2VJU September 13, 2013 Rochester VHF Group 43