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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

As you all hopefully have heard by now, we launched the “Discuss” section of The Amp Hour this past weekend. Though it may be an unfamiliar format, we’re really hoping that listeners will take the time to stop by that part of our site. We think it could be a great way for everyone to get to know one another and build up the The Amp Hour community. However, if that alone isn’t enough motivation for you, there will be two other functions of the Discuss section:

1. Guest Questions

   Since the Discuss section has a built in voting system for links and comments, it’s well suited to people asking questions to our upcoming guests on the show. The top rated questions will get asked (as opposed to Dave and Chris choosing at random of the comments left on a post). This coming week, we’ll have Matt Ettus of Ettus Research on the show. Matt started a Software Defined Radio company that developed the Universal Software Radio Peripheral. Since starting the company, Ettus research was acquired by National Instruments, maker of test equipment and control software. Please leave any questions you’d like us to ask him on the discussion site!

2. News Items

   You have probably heard Chris and Dave talk about “the list”, right? Well right now, that lives in a Google Document that is closed off to anyone but us and our guests. A secondary function of the Discuss section of The Amp Hour will be to act as a proxy to “the list”. More specifically, “the list” will get phased out and we’ll instead move towards a public, discussable, user-submittable set of news items and projects that we will work from for each show.

   What does this mean for you? It means there’s an easier way to help participate in shaping the show! Instead of posting something to our “Suggestions” page, you can now submit the link directly to the Discuss section of the website. If you don’t know of anything to submit (and that’s definitely not required, we’ll be adding throughout the week), you can go there and vote on your favorite stories. And if you have something to say about a specific story or idea, you can leave a comment or start a discussion with other members of the site. Interactivity at its finest!

We know that it’s weird when things start to change, but hopefully with the above two points you can start to see some of the reasoning behind starting the Discuss section. We can interact with you, get better feedback and really make sure we’re covering the stuff that the community would like us to cover. If you have any questions or comments, head over to the Discussion area now and start a new thread!

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Our 100th episode! Thank you so much to everyone who has continued listening and supporting us! And thanks to Jeff Keyzer for helping us continue broadcasting each week!

• Happy (recent) Birthday Dave! What an awesome cake! And a video documenting the details!
  
• The Amp Hour has an updated server!
• We also have a brand new Discussion Server (http://discuss.theamphour.com) to try and promote more community among our listeners. We want you all to get to know one another. Check out that link or the “Discuss” link at the top of the page!
• Car Talk is going off the air soon after 25+ years of radio. Sad!
• Miroslav Batek has this great idea for stick-on labels for micros with the pinout!
• Dave will have a booth at the upcoming Electronex show in Sydney. What should he do at his booth?
• The Canton Fair coming up in China will have over 210,000 buyers. Wow!!
• Fabs are being built all over the world. TSMC just announced they’re building a 450mm fab for $8-10B! That’s a lot of money!
• Speaking of large chip companies, Intel’s head of mobile dismissed ARM as a competitor recently. Really? Where are the phones with Intel chips?
• Looking for old semi equipment? Alvaro let us know about the used semi equipment you can buy from Texas Instruments online. Someone call Jeri!
• Got some old machines? Make some analog chips! Fab processes move down the chain from digital to analog, as laid out by a VP from TI, Dr. Venu Menon. He was being interviewed by our guest from last week, Steve Leibson.
• Graduating from school soon? Looking for work? One of our listeners, Cody Shaw, wrote in about his 555 business card.
• @Laen has recently transitioned the Dorkbot PCB service over to OSHPark! Check out the new site!
• Fluxor from Engineer Blogs wrote a few weeks back about his interview style for new engineers. The main lesson? Know your basics!
• Dave got a $30, 7″ TFT-based eReader. Chris reiterated his point of view about abstracting interfaces for devices.
• Sensationalizing technology in the media: CNBC reports on the “Backdoor” put into an Actel FPGA.
• Through Silicon Vias are crazy. Texas Instruments is now doing trying them on their 28 nm process. Dave did a video about orders of magnitude:
  
• Chip of the Week!
  • TI (really the now-defunct National Semi–you can tell by the part name) now have a controller to create a GaN based Buck controller (for high temperature, high voltage or fast switching), the LM5113 GaN Controller. It’s amazing how delicate these devices are for being able to handle so much voltage across them!

Thanks for listening for the past 100 episodes! We appreciate it so much!

Be sure to drop by the Discussion Area and get to know one another! See you there!

Thanks to kcgiessen for the party soundclip!

Thanks to all of our wonderful donors, we’ve been able to upgrade some of our web server equipment and begin offering more services in the near future. As such, we just switched over from our old server to the new one.

Congrats! You’ve arrived at our new server! Let us know how it’s working in the comments!

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Welcome, Steve Leibson!

• Steve and Chris share an alma mater, Case Western Reserve University.
• Steve started his career at HP, working on the HP9825 (which Steve keeps history on).
• The SOL20, an S-100 based on the Z80.
  • Came with a high quality keyboard made by Cherry and had sideboards made of Walnut.
  • A video of a re-build of a SOL20
    
• Like many people, Steve has an opinion on the split of HP and Agilent.
• Next Steve began writing. He eventually became the editor in chief of EDN magazine!
• He also the was the VP of Content and the Editor in Chief at Microprocessor Report.
• Steve bounced between writing and working at CAD companies, like Cadnetix. That later merged with DAISY systems. The merger of the two was a “fiasco”.
• After all the mergers and moves, Steve ended up running the Denali Memory Report and as a marketer at Cadence when they acquired Denali in 2010. Steve now regularly writes for the EDA360 Insider Blog.
• Steve recently attended the Design Automation Conference, which is now in its 49th year!
• Startups are still a possibility according to Steve; in fact, they can be quite profitable if you find the right niche.
• Leibson’s Law says that it takes 10 years for any disruptive technology to be adopted by designers. That rule of thumb is based on decades of observation and includes the adoption of transistors, ICs, microprocessors, C for embedded design, etc.
• Steve worked on an infomercial with Leonard Nimoy as an expert for e-Commerce and touch screens…or whatever they needed him to be an expert on.

Thanks again to Steve for being on our show! It was a great insight into the EDA world!