Chaochen Wei's AntSDR E200 Aims to Combine the Best of the PlutoSDR and the USRP B200

(UPDATE: 7/3/2023): The AntSDR E200 crowdfunding campaign is entering its final days, and has already raised nearly five times its modest $20,000 funding goal.

Built around the Analog Devices AD9363/AD9361 field-programmable radio-frequency integrated circuit and an AMD/Xilinx ZYNQ-7020 field-programmable gate array, the AntSDR E200 software-defined radio offers two full-duplex MIMO channels with a tuning range from 70MHz to 6GHz and up to 56MHz of bandwidth for the top-end variant.

The lower-specification AD9363-based version is priced at $299 plus shipping with the higher-end AD9361-based model at $499. Both include a 32GB microSD card, with an optional case available for an additional $40. All physical rewards are expected to ship by late September this year.

More information is available on the project's Crowd Supply page.

Original article continues below.

FPGA designer Chaochen Wei is preparing to launch an open-hardware software-defined radio (SDR) bard, based on the AMD Xilinx ZYNQ-7020 and offering two full-duplex channels and a 20MHz bandwidth: The AntSDR E200.

"[The] AntSDR E200 is inspired by [ADALM-PLUTO] PlutoSDR and Ettus USRP B200," Wei explains of the project. "Visually speaking, having an AntSDR E200 is equivalent to having both PlutoSDR and USRP B200 at the same time. With the Ethernet interface of AntSDR E200, you can easily use a network switch to deploy AntSDR E200 to the remote end."

The heart of the board is the AMD Xilinx ZYNQ-7020, a system-on-chip that combines two Arm Cortex-A9 MPCore processor cores running at up to 866MHz with an Analog Devices AD9363 field-programmable gate array (FPGA) offering 85k logic cells, 4.9Mb of block RAM, 220 DSP slices, and up to 200 input/output (IO) pins. For PlutoSDR users, it should all seem very familiar — to the point that Wei has ported the project's open source firmware to the AntSDR E200.

Elsewhere on the board is a gigabit Ethernet port for remote operation, with an offload engine to improve throughput, 512MB of DDR3 memory, and 256Mb of QSPI flash, along with the radio-frequency integrated circuit (RFIC), which provides the four channels — two receive and two transmit, capable of operating independently or as two full-duplex channels. The board is claimed to offer a frequency range from 325MHz up to 3.8GHz with sampling at 61.44 mega-samples per second (MSPS) and a 20MHz bandwidth.

Wei's company, MicroPhase, has released both the ported PlutoSDR firmware and a version of the Ettus UHD firmware on GitHub under the reciprocal GNU General Public License 3, along with a "reduced version of [the] schematic" in PDF format.

Anyone looking to get their hands on a board, though, will have to wait: Wei is planning to launch a crowdfunding campaign via Crowd Supply in the near future, but at the time of writing no firm date had been set.