Can I Program the FPGA of NI USRP RIO over Ethernet?

Updated Sep 27, 2022

Reported In

Hardware

  • USRP Software Defined Radio Reconfigurable Device

Software

  • LabVIEW FPGA Module

Driver

  • NI-USRP

Issue Details

We have an NI USRP RIO device and we are planning to program the FPGA using LabVIEW or LabVIEW Communications System Design Suite. Is it possible to generate the bitfile and program the FPGA over Ethernet (1GigE)?

Solution

You cannot program or download a bitfile on the FPGA over Ethernet.  To use LabVIEW FPGA with the USRP RIO you must be connected with the PCIe link.
 

Additional Information

The primary bus interface for the USRP RIO is PCIe x4 which provides an effective connection for high bandwidth and lower latency applications such as PHY/MAC research.  The bus allows users to stream data at 800MB/s and  customize the FPGA in LabVIEW FPGA. The interface is backwards compatible with programs written for the NI USRP-292x and NI USRP-293x devices.

The NI USRP-294x/295x devices with the NI-USRP driver in LabVIEW also support connectivity over 1G and 10G ethernet using the SFP+ ports on the back of the device, however it is not possible to modify the FPGA when connected over ethernet.

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