Ettus USRP™ N210 Series Hardware

Digilent's Ettus USRP N210 is a high performing class of hardware of the universal software radio peripheral (USRP) family of products, enabling engineers to rapidly design and implement powerful, flexible software radio systems. The hardware is suited for applications requiring high RF performance and excellent bandwidth. Applications include physical layer prototyping, dynamic spectrum access and cognitive radio, spectrum monitoring, recording and playback, and networked sensor deployment.

The USRP N210 offers high-bandwidth, high-dynamic range processing capability. The Gigabit Ethernet interface of the USRP N210 allows high-speed streaming capability of up to 100 MS/s in both directions (8-bit samples). These features, combined with plug-and-play MIMO capability, make the USRP N210 an ideal candidate for software-defined radio (SDR) systems with demanding performance requirements.

The USRP N210’s product architecture includes a Xilinx® Spartan® 3A-DSP 3400 FPGA, 100 MS/s dual ADC, 400 MS/s dual DAC, and Gigabit Ethernet connectivity to stream data to and from host processors. The modular design allows the USRP N210 to operate from DC to 6 GHz; an expansion port allows multiple USRP N210 series devices to be synchronized and used in a MIMO configuration. An optional GPSDO module can also be used to discipline the USRP N210 reference clock to within 0.01 ppm of the worldwide GPS standard. This device can stream up to 50 MS/s to and from host applications. Users can implement custom functions in the FPGA fabric or the on-board 32-bit RISC softcore. The USRP N210 provides a larger FPGA than the USRP N200 for applications demanding additional logic, memory, and DSP resources. The FPGA also offers the potential to process up to 100 MS/s in both the transmit and receive directions. The FPGA firmware can be reloaded through the Gigabit Ethernet interface.