Electronics > Projects, Designs, and Technical Stuff

Is Software Defined Radio(SDR) Patented ?

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SDRbiCurious:
Hi There;

I want to design and maybe sell a software defined radio.
However, I don't know whether it is patented or not.
There is a lot of SDRs in the market LimeSDR, BladeRF, HackRF, AirSpy, etc ...

Are they paying license fee? Or what would happen if you accidentally violate a patent ?

DaJMasta:
A specific SDR may be, SDRs as a whole are far to vague to be patented, and many (including some of those mentioned) are fully open source, open hardware.  Edit:  Don't know if airspy is open hardware, but it is open source.  Otherwise, you can get source design files/firmware/software for free for all of those mentioned.


So no.

radiolistener:
SDR means that the main design is defined in software.
So, if you based your software on other software (for example used some code from some project), it may leads to license problems.
But if you developed your own software from scratch (with no using other modules or some code) then it's your and you can do whatever you want.

magic:
 :-DD
So naive. Software patents totally are a thing in America and you would be surprised by what can be patented there.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/01/how-newegg-crushed-the-shopping-cart-patent-and-saved-online-retail/
So okay, these guys had their patents invalidated, but only when they got greedy and went after too big of a player. They successfully extorted loyalties from others before and the same can happen to you if you do your business in America.

Just because something is open source doesn't mean it isn't patent encumbered. The FAT filesystem is (was?) partly patented and yet free implementations abound. Ditto for many media codecs. Open source implementations of such things exist because no one outside America gives a damn and American Linux vendors tend to remove problematic parts from their systems or get some deals or violate the patent hoping that the owner won't come after them because they have their own patents to wield against them.

That being said, I have no idea what patents may apply to SDR techniques or the idea of SDR itself, if any. I suspect a patent on "SDR itself" would be ruled invalid as too obvious or too broad, like that shopping cart thing, but patents on particular techniques may be enforceable. Of course IANAL.

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