Universal Software Radio Peripheral

Developed by a team led by Matt Ettus, the USRP product family is commonly used by research labs, universities, and hobbyists.

The USRP family was designed for accessibility, and many of the products are open source hardware.

The USRP product family includes a variety of models that use a similar architecture.

A motherboard provides the following subsystems: clock generation and synchronization, FPGA, ADCs, DACs, host processor interface, and power regulation.

A modular front-end, called a daughterboard, is used for analog operations such as up/down-conversion, filtering, and other signal conditioning.

In most use-cases, these complex samples are transferred to/from applications running on a host processor, which perform DSP operations.

Using a Gigabit Ethernet interface, the devices in the Networked Series can transfer up to 50 MS/s of complex, baseband samples to/from the host.

The N300, N310, N320 and N321 are current dual-channel models offering SFP+ connectivity, up to 200 MS/s and optionally sharing of local oscillators and TPM modules for verifiable software deployments.

The E310, released in November 2014, utilizes the Zynq SoC platform and the Analog Devices AD9361 RFIC for a very compact, embedded USRP.