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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
It is quite surprising that NI didn’t try to smother Ettus Research (yet). Their biggest asset LabView is a prime candidate for open source competition as is some of their hardware.
While I have many complaints about NI they do not tend to do that to the companies they buy. They own the people who make Multisim and have yet to really even work *with* them. The NI people I have talked too all refer to the multisim subsidiary as those weird Canadians. (keep in mind I think of NI as those weird Texans)
A serious question for (I guess American) listeners. Does everyone start an answer with “So….” nowadays? For some reason I just seem to hear it on AmpHour guests.
I think this could be a function of our not having visual cues. That actually makes it quite difficult to know when to start talking; sometimes a buffer word like, “So” or “Right” or “Yeah” is required. Think of it like a preamble message 😉
But no, I don’t think it’s a cultural thing.
Nice picture, seems to be a pastiche of Bill Gates Teen Beat Photospread.
A guy answered my question with “So …” in person, twenty years ago. It was my first experience with it. I thought he meant, “Shut up and don’t ask questions. I am talking”.
hahaha
This is a bit of a late comment, but I’d like to say that as a new grad who recently started working in a GPS startup, I really found this to be an interesting interview! 🙂