An Interview with Matt Ettus - Quality Quadrature Quidam

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Welcome, Matt Ettus!

 

• Matt started and still runs Ettus Research, now a 12 person Software Defined Radio (SDR) company located in the Bay Area
• Matt got interested in SDR through the GNU radio project.
• He got his start working at Bluetooth and GPS type startups.
• In 2010, National Instruments acquired Ettus Research and they continue to run quite autonomously.
• The main projects of Ettus Research revolve around the Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP). There are multiple flavors of this device.
• The newest products mainly use Spartan3A FPGAs, though previously they ran with Altera Cyclone I's.
• These radios have MIMO capability, meaning they have multiple inputs and multiple outputs.
• The USRPs can mimic the cellphone base stations that talk to the devices we have in our pockets and the femtocells that are becoming more and more commercially available. This device was used to spoof security personnels' phones at DEFCON....and it worked!
• There were once cores from the OpenCores website, but now most of that work is done in house. And it's open source!f
• The Xilinx Zynq7000 now has a ($1400!) dev kits for reconfigurable SDR development.

Many thanks to Matt Ettus for stopping by and to everyone who asked questions over in the new Discussion Forum. If you have more questions or want to continue the conversation, head over there and start a new thread!

 

Thanks to Quinn Norton for the picture of Matt