This paper discusses the development of a new wideband RF front end daughterboard using the Motorola RFIC chip.
This thesis describes work on a new RF front end daughterboard for the Universal Software Radio Peripheral, or USRP. The USRP is a software-radio hardware platform designed to be used with the GNU Radio software radio software package. Using the Motorola RFIC chip, the new daughterboard receives RF signals, converts them to baseband and does analog filtering and amplification before feeding the signal into the USRP for processing. The chip also takes transmit signals from the USRP, converts them from baseband to RF and amplifies and filters them. The board was designed and laid out by Randall Nealy. The author wrote the software driver for GNU Radio. The driver defines the interface between the USRP and the RFIC chip, controls the physical settings, and calculates and sets the hundreds of variables necessary to operate this extremely complex chip correctly. It allows plug-and-play compatibility with the current USRP daughterboards and supplies additional functions not available in any other daughterboard. The goal of software-defined radio (SDR) is to move the processing of radio signals from the analog domain to the digital domain — to use digital microchips instead of analog circuit components. (Published Abstract Provided)