NXP doesn't share many details on the LA9310. Could just be too early, but it smells like a "you must convince a sales rep you're going to be a qualified customer and sign a stack of NDAs before you dare ask for a datasheet or instruction set manual" situation, which is unfortunate.
Example: https://github.com/nxp-qoriq?q=la93
Yes, of course, this will be sold to anybody and be very, very competitive, like in the order of ~$550 including the Granita board ($100 less for GranitaLite).
What is the compatibility with existing SDR software?
It mentions multiple ADCs, can it work as a coherent receiver, similar to kraken?
All existing SDR software should be supported via OsmoSDR.
Yes, it should work as a coherent receiver. There are some questions about unmatched I/Q pair trace lengths, but from what I heard from the experts as long as the clock is coherent (which it is), we should be able to correct those in software.
But yes, the long lead time is the reason for the waitlist!
Why the weird angle of those main ICs?
Usually it's 45 degrees or parallel to the board.
I get that it's triggering people, I get PTSD thinking about needing to touch that routing as well. Altium doesn't support arbitrary-angle differential pairs, so this was a huge mess. Next time I should just ask the PCB manufacturer to rotate the fiberglass sheets by a few degrees instead.
Edit: the other thread shows me writing a reply at 2am this morning... Pretty sure I didn't dream walk just to post on HN...
> There are two embedded antennas to ensure that we can always correct any internal frequency drift by syncing to the cell network.
What do you mean? Do you have your own DSP stack to deal with that while user receiving/transmitting? If there is, do you provide any control over it?
Aside from that,
- What is the compatibility with open source LTE, 5G solutions(SRS, OAI, etc.)?
- I couldn't see PPS input. Are you planning to add it with daughterboards?
> What do you mean? Do you have your own DSP stack to deal with that while user receiving/transmitting? If there is, do you provide any control over it?
You can quickly pause whatever is running on the LA9310, push the NXP NLM stack, correct local frequency errors by synching to a cell network tower and then resume normal operation. It's going to cause a glitch, but if you want to maintain frequency accuracy it's a small cost you need to pay. Once you have absolute deviation and drift it should track quite well.
My understanding is that SRS and the like all require beefy desktop-class processors to run in?
Yes. You can ignore this question. I should have asked you the driver first. I think you replied that question already on another comment. Thx for your explanation. Looking forward to seeing it in the market soon.
But fair feedback, noted. I can't move the optional OCXO below the enclosure, as that would be taller than the aluminium block itself and require a slot breaking the RF shielding, but maybe I can move the connectors. I'll try and get creative.
Edit, surface-mount MMCX to the rescue? https://i.imgur.com/1GJhJa6.png
I can't stand the amount of fragile connectors people keep installing on expensive boards. My BladeRF's micro USB 3.0 sheared off.
USB-C is even a bit contentious for me. USB-A with the 3.0 extensions is much more durable.
Best of luck with the project. I couldn't find anything on "Granita". Is it called "SnowWings" now?
The idea is however you get shielding and cooling, sit it on the desk upside down and have all the RFNM boards accessible from the top.
(1) The AFE7903 wouldn't allow for any modularity in the system (look at what we are calling the RFNM interface on the website, I think that's the real reason this platform will work),
(2) Pricing, that single chip would cost in quantity 1k more than our current BOM, and you still need to add FPGAs, frontend, etc. next to it.
(3) Those single chip frontend modules don't have the embedded DSP cores we can use to do things like processing FFTs in real time and feeding them to a browser with no computing on the host, which I think will be very cool (multiple 160 MHz FFTs with a gr-phosphor like visualisation I think has never been done before at this price point).
What are some examples of practical use cases for a platform like this? What are the benefits of this SDR platform compared to other solutions?
1) Direction finding thanks to the 8x 153 MSPS ADCs and coherent clocks.
2) Mixed domain analyzer: have one daughterboard act as a RF receiver, and at the same time sample an analogue voltage with the other one. This is a capability reserved to the most expensive of test equipment and lets you analyze how a RF switch is behaving (or do side channel attacks?).
3) Sample almost 600 MHz of bandwidth in real time, use the powerful DSP core to run FFTs on it and send the results over to a browser that implements a RTSA display. This lets you have a real-time view of the spectrum around you for just a few watts. Thanks to the double-PPLs on the Granita board, you can also sweep the spectrum very fast.
4) There is enough processing power onboard to enable RFNM as a 5G RedCap node. We are working with NXP to add an eSIM, so with the right software, this can become a fully-functional 5G UE and connect to the normal cell network. Don't care about 5G? You can write your own standard and deploy it on the same hardware (the limitation here is having access to NXP's DSP development tools, which might limit the processing to the beefy i.MX 8M Plus, but some cores will be available as binaries).
5) Technically, anything requiring an insane amount of ADCs and DACs. You can implement your own board, as the heavy lifting (the motherboard) is already done for you. You could prototype something easily with the development board that's on the website and turn it into a real design within weeks.
Also forms a lot of the basis of RADAR, though that's a separate use case.
To oversimplify: SDR allows you to build a radio based around math instead of complex electronics - or, at least fewer complex electronics. It sacrifices a bit of performance but confers a lot of the advantages you get in other software systems - updates, reconfigurability, etc.
at one place, we replaced entire banks of traditional radio scanners using a single SDR
a scanner could only dial into one frequency at a time, but an SDR let us capture entire swathes of the frequency spectrum and extract concurrent streams from multiple sources simultaneously
I'd love to sit down with my Lime and end-to-end my own cell base station... one day
As a comparison, $550 would be 10x to 20x less expensive than what's on the market today for similar bandwidth specs (Aaronia Spectran V6 and Ettus USRP).
