Nuand Research Blog

So we have received most of the components needed for the pre-production run (scroll down to see)! There were a few issues with some of the components not arriving in tubes or on reels, so we are working on getting them replaced in the next few days. The custom RF shields and factory programmed Si5338s will be the last components to arrive, which should hopefully happen within the next week or so. Once they arrive, the PCBs should have also arrived and allowing our contract manufacturer to give us an exact delivery date! Once we have those units in our hands we will spend a bit of time verifying and calibrating each unit, and ultimately ship them to pre-production backers in a timely manner!

Hundreds of DC barrel jacks weigh close to 7 pounds!

Discrete components on reels.

Mini-Circuits RF transformers on massive reels.

Thousands of SMA connectors weighing close to 16 pounds.

Pre-production FPGAs and FX3s arrived with specially dehumidified boxes.

Line up of everything that has arrive so far.

This week was rather exciting, we finished sourcing all of the components and it seems like everything is in stock and its way for our pre-production run! There is one caveat, we will only receive some components in the quantities needed for mass production in a few weeks, however this will not affect the manufacturing dates for the pre-production or mass production runs at all. The last pieces to arrive will be the RF shields and the factory programmed Si5338s, it is likely we will have these in our hands within two or so weeks. By that time the bare PCBs should be fabricated allowing for assembly to take place within the following week or so. We are working on expediting these dates, we will let you know if there are any updates.

Lastly, here is our test rig for the boards we have been packing up for our beta customers!

As expected, this past week was filled with many component sourcing tasks. We encountered an issue with the availability of one of the power regulators but we were able to quickly find a substitute for it. Otherwise our supply chain seems to be on time for the pre-production and production runs. By this time next week we will have estimated delivery dates for all of our components so we will have a much clearer picture of our production dates.
We have also sent out pre-production Gerbers for DFM and are working closely with our contract manufacturer as we transition to their mass production suppliers.
As for an update on the pre-production boards, we have mentioned upgrading the Si5330 clock distribution chip to an Si5338 (on all of the boards) for clock generation purposes. The Si5338 is a low-jitter clock source which will allow the bladeRF’s performance to improve greatly. Among the previously mentioned improvements, we’ve also added a removable cap RF shield to all of the boards.
Lastly, we have changed the expansion port header to a high pitch 60 pin SMT samtec header, which allows for an entire bank of FPGA IO pins to be brought out to the main expansion port.We have also added an additional 0.1″ pitch 6 pin mini expansion port that is meant to be more convenient for developing addons.
Next week should be interesting and we will keep you posted!