Silicon Valley Homebrew Mobile Phone Club October Meeting October 11, 2006

This month’s agenda will focus on things “slightly closer to the machine” than we’ve been talking about in the past. Whereas most of us are thinking about using off the shelf parts (Telit GSM modules, GumStix boards, etc.) there’s another route that’s challenging yet equally compelling… building your own processors and radio modules from IP cores and software defined radio modules. This month we’re welcoming Matt Ettus of Ettus Research ( http://www.ettus.com/ ). Matt will be talking to us about (and hopefully demonstrating) his Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP) system which acts as a test-bed for SDF applications. While we would never recommend anyone attempt to connect an uncertified GSM radio to a commercial network, Software Defined Radio may be an interesting option for people working with VoIP over unregulated spectrum data networks.

We also have a discussion about Sun’s new OpenSPARC ( http://www.opensparc.net/ ) initiative tentatively scheduled. The OpenSPARC initiative has opened the RTL source for Sun’s T1 architecture. While we’re probably a long way off from being able to simply download a processor design directly into a prototyping board and expecting it to “just work.” And let’s not forget that FPGA’s are generally horrible when it comes to processing capability per watt; but Sun claims the T1 design has the highest performance per watt of any mainstream processor when incorporated into an ASIC. What with Sun opening Solaris and OpenBoot, maybe there’s room out there for a PollFon to go along with the TuxPhone? (Poll is one of the OpenSolaris mascots.)

As usual, we’ll be having snacks before the official presentations and a discussion of the status of various projects afterwards.

Official Website: http://hbmobile.org/blog/?p=4