Has anyone in here ever worked with LibUSB or PiUSB? Hands up. Okay, who also thinks USB is a pain? Okay, Sergei and Alexander were here back in at the 2063, that's a long time ago. I think it was back in Berlin. And back then they presented their first homemade or not homemade, SDR software-defined radio. This year, they are back again and they want to show us how they implemented another one. Using an FPGA and to communicate with it, they used PCI Express. So I think if you thought USB was a pain, let's see what they can tell us about PCI Express. A warm round of applause for Alexander and Sergei for building a high throughput low latency PCI-based software-defined radio. Hi everyone. Good morning and welcome to the first day of the Congress. So just a little bit background about what we've done previously and why we are doing what we are doing right now is that we started working with software-defined radios. And by the way, who knows what software-defined radio is? Okay, perfect. And whoever actually used the software-defined radio is RTL-SDR or, okay, less people but still quiet a lot. Okay, good. I wonder whether anyone here use it more expensive radios like usurps, less people, but for you, okay, good. Cool. Before 2008, I had no idea what software-defined radio is. Was working with voice over IP, software person, et cetera, et cetera. So in 2008, I heard about it on BTS, got introduced to software-defined radio and I wanted to make it really work. And that's what led us to today. In 2009, we had to develop a clock tamer, a hardware which allows to use, allowed to use usurp1 to run GSM without problems. If anyone ever tried doing this without a good clock source knows what I'm talking about and we presented this. It wasn't really an SDR, it was just a clock source. We presented this in 2009 in the 2063. Then we realized that using usurp1 is not really a good idea because we wanted to build a robust industrial-grade base stations. So we started developing our own software-defined radio which we call UMTRIX. And it was in 2011. Our first base stations were deployed in 2013, but I always wanted to have something really small and really inexpensive. And back then, it wasn't possible. My original idea in 2011, we were to build a PCI express card. Sorry, not PCI express card, but mini-PCI card. If you remember, there were a lot of Wi-Fi cards in the mini-PCI form factor. And I thought that that would be really cool to have an SDR and mini-PCI so I can plug this into my laptop or in some embedded PC and have a nice SDR equipment. But back then, it just was not really possible because electronics were bigger and more power hungry and just didn't work that way. So we designed UMTRIX to work over Gigabit Ethernet and it was about that size. So now we spend this year designing something which really brings me to what I wanted those years ago. So the X-Tricks is a mini-PCI express. Again, there was no PCI express back then. So now it's mini-PCI express, which is even smaller than mini-PCI. And it's built to be embedded friendly so you can plug this into a single board computer and by the single board computer, if you have a laptop with a mini-PCI express, you can plug this into your laptop and you have a really small software defined radio equipment. And we really want to make it inexpensive. That's why I was asking how many of you have ever worked with RTL-SDR, how many of you have ever worked with usurps because the gap between them is pretty big. And we want to really bring the software defined radio to masses. Definitely won't be as cheap as RTL-SDR, but we try to make it as close as possible. And at the same time, so at the size of RTL-SDR, at the price well higher, but hopefully it will be affordable to pretty much everyone, we really want to bring high performance into your hands. And by high performance, I mean, this is a full transmit receive with two channels, transmit, two channels receive, two by, which is usually called two by two MIMO in the radio world. The goal was to bring it to 160 mega samples per second, which can roughly give you like 120 megahertz of radio spectrum available. So what we were able to achieve is, again, this is mini PCI Express form factor. It has small Arctic 7, that's the smallest and most inexpensive FPGA, which has ability to work with a PCI Express. It has LMS 7000 chip for RFIC, very high performance, very tightly embedded chip with even a DSP blocks inside. It has even a GPS chip here. Do you see my, no, you can't see it, but. So it has, you can actually on the right upper side you can see a GPS chip. So you can actually synchronize your SDR to GPS for perfect clock stability. So you won't have any problems running any telecommunication systems like GSM 3G, 4G due to clock problems. And it also has interface for SIM cards, so you can actually create a software defined radio modem and there are audio controls projects to build one in a 4LT called the SRSUE, if you're interested, et cetera, et cetera. So it's really, really tightly packed one. And if you put this into perspective, that's how it all started in 2006. And that's what you have 10 years later. It's pretty impressive. So. Thanks. But I think it's actually up close to the whole industry who is working on shrinking the sizes because we just put stuff on the PCB. We are not building the silicon itself. Interesting thing is that we did the first approach with said, let's pack everything, let's do a very tight PCB design. We did an eight layer PCB design. And when we send it to a fab to estimate the cost, it turned out it's 15,000 US dollars per piece. Well, in small volumes, obviously, but still a little bit too much. So we had to redesign this. And the first thing which we did is we still kept eight layers because in our experience, number of layers nowadays have only minimal impact on the cost of the device. So like six, eight layers, the price difference is not so big. But we did complete rerouting and only kept two deep microvias and never used the buried wires. So this make it much easier and much faster for the fab to manufacture it. And the price suddenly went five, six times down. And in volume again, it will be significantly cheaper. And that's just for geek porn how PCB looks inside. So now let's go into real stuff. So PCI Express, why did we choose PCI Express?  You can't really use USB in industrial systems for the whole variety of reasons, just unstable. So we did use Ethernet for many years successfully but Ethernet has one problem. First of all, inexpensive Ethernet is only one gigabit and one gigabit does not offer you enough bandwidth to carry all the data we want. Plus it's power hungry, et cetera, et cetera. So PCI Express is really a good choice because it's low power, it has low latency, it has very high bandwidth and it's available almost universally. When we started looking into this, we realized that even ARM boards, some of ARM boards have mini PCI Express slots, which was a big surprise for me, for example. So the problems is that unlike USB, you do need to write your own kernel driver for this and there is no way around. And it is really hard to write this driver universally so we are writing it obviously for Linux because we're working with embedded systems but if we want to rewrite it for Windows or for macOS we'll have to do a lot of rewriting. So we focus on what we want on Linux only right now. And now the hardest part, debugging is really non-trivial. One small error and your PC is completely hang because you did something wrong and you have to reboot it and restart it. And that's like debugging kernel, but sometimes even harder. To make it worse, there is no really easy to use plug and play interface. If you want to restart normally when you develop a PCI Express card when you want to restart it, you have to restart your development machine. Again, not a nice way, it's really hard. So the first thing we did is we found that we can use Thunderbolt 3, which is just recently released. And it has ability to work directly with PCI Express bus. So it basically has a mode in which it converts a PCI Express into plug and play interface. So if you have a laptop which supports Thunderbolt 3, then you can use this to plug and play your plug or unplug your device to make your development easier. There are always problems. There's no easy way. There is no documentation. Thunderbolt is not compatible with Thunderbolt. Thunderbolt 3 is not compatible with Thunderbolt 2. So we had to buy a special laptop with Thunderbolt 3 with special cables, like all this hard stuff. And if you really want to get documentation, you have to sign NDA and send a business plan to them so they can prove that your business makes sense. I mean, so we actually opted out. We said not to go through this. What we did is we found that someone is actually making PCI Express with Thunderbolt 3 converters and selling them as dev boards. And that was a big relief because it saved us lots of time, lots of money. Just ordered it from some Asian company. And yeah, this is how it looks like, this converter.  And this is with X-Turics or the plug into it. The only problem we found is that typically, UFI has security control enabled so that any random Thunderbolt device can't hijack your PCI bus and can't get access to your kernel memory and do some bad stuff, which is a good idea. The only problem is that it's not fully implemented in Linux, so under Windows, if you plug in a device which has no security features, which is not certified, that will politely ask you, do you really trust this device? Do you want to use it? You can say yes. Under Linux, it just does not work. So we spent some time trying to figure out how to get around this. There are some patches from Intel which are not main-lined and we were not able to actually get them work. So we just had to disable this security measure in the laptop. So be aware that this is the case and we suspect that happy users of Apple might not be able to do this because Apple don't have BIOS so you probably can't disable this feature. So probably a good incentive for someone to actually finish writing the driver. So now to the goal. So we want to achieve 160 mega-samples per second 2x2 MIMO, which means to transmit, to receive channels at 12 bits, which is roughly 7.5 gigabit per second. So first result, when we got this war from the fab, it didn't work. That's expected. So the first interesting thing we realized is that, first of all, the FPGA has hardware blocks for talking to a PCI Express, which called GTP, which basically implement like a PCI Express serial physical layer. But the thing is the numbering is reversed in the in PCI Express and in FPGA. And we didn't realize this. So we had to do very, very fine soldering to actually swap the lanes. You can see this very fine work there. We also found that one of the components was that bug, which is a well-known term for chips, which, at design stage, are placed mirrored. So we occasionally mirrored the pinout. So we had to solder it upside down. And if you can realize how small it is, you can also appreciate the work done. And what's funny, when I was looking at the dead bugs, I actually found a manual from NASA which describes how to properly solder dead bugs to get it approved. So this is the link. I think you can go there and enjoy. There's lots of fun stuff there. So after fixing all of this, our next attempt kind of works. So next stage is debugging the FPGA code which has to talk to PCI Express, and PCI Express has to talk to Linux kernel. Linux kernel has to talk to the driver. Driver has to talk to the user space. So peripherals are easy. So all the UARTs, SPIs, we've got to work almost immediately. No problems with that. But DMA was a real beast. So we spent lots of time trying to get DMA to work. And the problem is that with DMA, it's on an FPGA, so you can't just place a breakpoint like you do in C or C++ or in other languages. It's a real-time system running, not a system like it's a real-time hardware which is running on the fabric. So we had to... Sergey was mainly developing this. He had to write a lot of small test benches and test everything piece by piece. So all parts of the DMA code we had was routed into a small test bench which was emulating all the tricks. And as Classics predicted, it took about five to ten times more than actually writing the code. So we really blew up our predicted timelines by doing this, but at the end, we've got really stable work. So some suggestions for anyone who will try to repeat this exercise is there is a logic analyzer built into Xilinx, and you can use it. It's nice. Sometimes it's very helpful, but you can't debug transient bugs which are coming out when some weird conditions are coming up. So you have to implement some readback registers which shows important statistic... important data about how your system behaves. In our case, it's various counters on the DMA interface so you can actually see what's happening with your data. Is it received? Is it sent? How much is sent? How much is received? So, for example, we can see when we saturate the bus or when actually there's an underrun so the host is not providing data fast enough so we can at least understand whether it's a Hust problem or whether it's an FPGA problem on which part should we debug next. It's a very multi-layer problem. It starts with FPGA, PCI Express, kernel, driver, user space, and any part can fail. So you can't work blind like this. So, again, the goal was to get 160 mega-samples. With the first naive implementation we got 2 mega-samples per second. Roughly 60 times slower. The problem is that software just wasn't keeping up and wasn't sending data fast enough. So there was like many things done but the most important parts is use real-time priority if you want to get very stable results and, well, fix software bugs and one of the most important bugs we had was that DMA buffers weren't freed in proper time immediately. So they were busy for longer than they should be which introduced extra cycles and basically just reduced the bandwidth. So, at this point, let's talk a little bit about how to implement a high-performance driver for Linux because if you want to get real performance you have to start with the right design. So there are basically three approaches and the whole spectrum in between. Like two approaches and the whole spectrum in between which you can refer to three. So the first approach is full kernel control in which case kernel driver not only is the transfer, it actually has all the logics of controlling your device and only export your QTL to the user space and that's kind of a traditional way of writing drivers. Your user space is completely abstracted from all the details. Well, the problem is that this is probably the slowest way to do it. So the other way is what's called a zero-copy interface. Your only control is held in the kernel and data is provided, raw data is provided to user space as is. So you avoid the memory copy which makes it faster but still not fast enough if you really want to achieve maximum performance because you still have context switches between the kernel and the user space. So the fastest approach possible is to have full user space implementation when kernel just expose everything and says now you do it yourself and you have no context switches like almost no and you can really optimize everything. So what are the problems with this? The pros I already mentioned no switches between kernel and user space it's very low latency because of this as well it's very high bandwidth but if you are not interested in getting the very high performance the most performance and you just want to have some low bandwidth performance then you will have to add hacks because you can't get notifications from the kernel that resources available which is more data available. So it also makes it vulnerable because if user space can access it then it can do whatever it want. So we at the end decided one more important thing so how actually to get the best performance out of the bus and this is where you have to decide whether you want to pull your device or not to pull, get notified. So what is pulling?  So it's basically a busy loop where you're just constantly asking device what's happening and you need to dedicate a full core and thanks God we have multi-core CPUs nowadays so you can dedicate the full core to this pulling and you can just pull constantly but again if you don't need this highest performance you just need to get something then you will be wasting a lot of CPU resources. So at the end we decided to do a combined architecture where it is possible to pull but there's also a chance to get notification from the kernel for applications which need low bandwidth but also require better CPU performance which I think is the best way if you're trying to target both worlds. So very quickly the architecture of the system so we tried to make it very, very portable and flexible so there is a kernel driver there is a kernel driver which talks to a low level library which implements all this logic which we took out of the driver to control the PCI Express to work with DMA to provide all the details of the actual bus implementation and then there is a high level library which talks to this low level library and also to libraries which implement control of actual peripherals and most importantly to the library which implements control over our RFIC chip so this way it's very modular we can replace PCI Express with something else later we might be able to port it to other operating systems and that's the goal another interesting issue is when you start writing a Linux kernel driver you very quickly realize that while LDD which is a classical book for Linux driver writing is good and it will give you a good insight it's not actually up to date it's more than 10 years old and there's all of new interfaces which are not described there so you have to resort to reading the manuals and all the documentation in the kernel itself well, at least you get the up-to-date information so the decisions we made is to make everything easy so we use TTI and TTY for GPS and so you can really attach a pretty much any application which talks to GPS all of the existing applications can just work out of the box and we also wanted to be able to synchronize system clock to GPS so we get automatic log synchronization across multiple systems it's very important when we are deploying multiple many many devices around the world so we plan to do two interfaces one is key PPS and another is DCD because DCD line on the UART exposed over TTY because again we found that there are two types of applications one API and others that support other API and there is no common thing so we have to support both what's interesting else is that as we described we want to have pull so we can get notifications from the kernel when data is available and we don't need to do real busy looping all the time so after all the software optimizations we've got to like 10 mega samples per second still very very far from what we want to achieve now there should have been a lot of explanations about PCI express but when we actually wrote everything we wanted to say we realized it's just like a full two hours talk just on PCI express so we are not going to give it here I'll just give some highlights which are most interesting if there is real interest we can set up a workshop in some of the later days and talk in more details about PCI express specifically so the thing is there is no open source course for PCI express which are optimized for high performance high performance real time applications there is ZaliBus which is understanding as really open source but they provide your source if you pay them but it's very popular because it's very very easy to do but it's not giving you performance if I remember correctly the best it can do is maybe like 50% bus saturation so there is also Xilinx implementation but if you are using Xilinx implementation with XIA bus that you are really locked in with XIA bus with Xilinx and it's also not very efficient in terms of resources and if you remember we want to make this very very inexpensive so our goal is to be able to fit everything in the smallest RTX 7 FPGA and that's quite challenging with all the stuff in there and we just can't waste resources so decision is to write your own PCI express implementation that's how it looks like we're not going to discuss it right now there were several iterations initially looked much simpler turned out not to work well some interesting stuff about PCI express which we stumbled upon is that it was working really well on ATOM which is our main development platform because we are doing a lot of embedded stuff worked really well when we tried to plug this into Core i7 just started hanging once in a while so after like several days maybe debugging Sergey found that there is very interesting statement in the standard which says that value 0 in byte count actually stands not for 0 bytes but for 4096 bytes I mean that's a really cool optimization so another thing is completion which is a term in PCI express basically for acknowledgement which also can carry some data back to your request and sometimes if you're not sending completion the device just hangs and what happens is that in this case due to some historical heritage of x86 it just starts returning you FFF and if you have a register which says is your device okay and this register shows one to say the device is okay guess what will happen you will be always reading that your device is okay so the suggestion is not to use one as the status for okay and use either 0 or better like a 2-bit sequence so you definitely sure that you are okay and not getting FFFs so when you have a device which may fail at any of the layers you just got this new board and it's really hard to debug and there's a lot of memory corruption so we had a software bug and it was writing DMA addresses incorrectly and we were wondering why we are not getting any data in our buffers and at the same time after several starts operating system just crashes well that's the reason why there is this UFI protection which prevents you from plugging in devices like this into your computer because it was basically writing data like random data into random portions of your memory so a lot of debugging a lot of tests and test benches and we were able to find this and another thing is if you initialize your driver incorrectly and that's what's happening when you have plug-and-play device which you can plug and unplug then you may end up in a situation where you are trying to write into memory which is already freed by operating system and used for something else very well-known problem but also happens here so why DMA is really hard is because it has this completion architecture for reading data writes are easy, you just send the data you forget about it but for reading you really need to get your data back and the thing is it looks like this I really hoped that there would be some pointing device here but basically on the top left you can see requests for read and on the right you can see completion transactions so basically each transaction can be and most likely will be split into multiple transactions so first of all you have to collect all these pieces and write them into proper parts of the memory but that's not all the thing is the latency between request and completion is really high it's like 50 cycles so if you have only single transaction in fly you will get really bad performance you do need to have multiple transactions in flight and worst thing is that transactions can return data in a random order so it's a much more complicated state machine than we expected originally so when I said our architecture was much simpler originally we did not have all of this and we had to realize this while implementing so again here was a whole description of how exactly this works but not this time so now after all these optimizations we've got 20 mega samples per second which is just six times lower than what we are aiming at so now the next thing is PCI express lane scalability so PCI express is a serial bus so it has multiple lanes and they allow you to basically horizontally scale your bandwidth one lane is like x then two lane is 2x four lane is 4x so the more lanes you have the more performance you are getting out of your bus the more bandwidth you are getting out of your bus so the issue is that a typical mini PCI express the mini PCI express standard only standardize one lane and second lane is left as optional so most motherboards don't support this there are some but not all of them and we really wanted to get this done so we designed a special converter board which allows you to plug your mini PCI express into a full-size PCI express and get two lanes of working and we are also planning to have a similar board which will have multiple slots so you will be able to get multiple X-tricks SDRs onto the same carrier board and plug this into let's say PCI express 16x and you will get really a lot of IQ data which then will be your problem how to process so with two A-axis it's about twice performance so we are getting 50 mega-samples per second and that's the time to really cut the fat because the real sample size of LMS 7 is 12 bits and we are transmitting 16 because it's easier because CPU is working on 8, 16 and 32 so we originally designed the driver to support 8-bit, 12-bit and 16-bit to be able to do this scaling and for the test we said okay let's go from 16 to 8-bit we'll lose some dynamic range but who cares these days still stayed the same still 50 mega-samples per second no matter what we did and that was a lot of interesting debugging going on and we realized that we actually made another not really a mistake we didn't really know this when we designed but we should have used a higher voltage for this high-speed bus to get it to the full performance and at 1.8 it was just degrading too fast and the bus itself was not performing well so our next prototype will be using higher voltage specifically for this bus and this is kind of style which makes designing hardware for high-speed really hard because you have to care about the coherence of the parallel buses on your system so at the same time we do want to keep 1.8V for everything else as much as possible because another problem we are facing with this device is that by the standard mini PCI Express allows only 2.5W of power consumption no more and we were very lucky that LMS-7 has so good power consumption performance we actually had some extra space to have FPGA and GPS and all that stuff but we just can't let the power consumption go up our measurements on this device are short about 2.3W of power consumption so we are at the limit at this point so when we fixed the bus with a higher voltage now it's a theoretical exercise because we haven't done this yet that's planned to happen in a couple of months we should be able to get to this number which was just 1.2 times slower and then the next thing will be to fix another issue which we made at the very beginning we procured a wrong chip just one digit difference you can see it's highlighted in red and green and this chip supports only generation 1 PCI Express which is twice slower than generation 2 PCI Express so again hopefully we'll replace the chip and just get very simple doubling of the performance still it will be slower than we wanted it to be and here is what kind of like practical versus theoretical numbers well as every bus it has overhats and one of the things which again we realized when we were implementing even though the standard dies as a payload size of 4 kilobytes actual implementations are different for example desktop computers like Core, Intel Core or Intel Atom they only have 128-byte payload so there is much more overhead going on the bus to transfer data and even theoretically you can only achieve 87% efficiency and on Xeon we tested and we found that they're using 256 payload size and this can give you like 92% efficiency on the bus and this is before the overhead so the real reality is even worse and the interesting thing which we also did not expect is that we originally were developing on Intel Atom and everything was working great when we plugged this into a laptop like Core i7 multi-core really powerful device we didn't expect that it wouldn't work obviously like Core i7 should work better than Atom no, not always the thing is we were plugging into a laptop which had a built-in video card which was sitting on the same PCI bus probably manufacturer hard-coded higher priority for the video card than for everything else in the system because you don't want your screen to flicker and so when you move a window you actually see the late packets coming to your PCI device we had to introduce a jitter buffer and add more FIFO into the device to smooth it out and on the other hand Xeon is performing really well so it's very optimized that said we tested it with discrete card and it performs everything by whooping 5-7% that's what you get for the price so this is actually the end of the presentation so we still have not scheduled any workshop but if there is any interest in actually seeing the device working or if you're interested in learning more about the PCI express in details let us know, we'll schedule something in the next few days that's it and I think we can proceed with questions if there are any okay, thank you very much if you are leaving now please try to leave quietly because we might have some questions and we want to hear them if you have questions please line up right behind the microphones and I think we'll just wait because we don't have anything from the signal angel however if you're watching on stream you can hop into the channels and over social media to ask questions and they will be answered hopefully so that microphone what's the minimum and maximum frequency of the card? you mean RF frequency? now the minimum frequency you can sample at the most RTL-SDR device is quite only sampled at over 50 MHz is there a similar limitation at your card? so if you're talking about RF frequency it can go from almost 0 even though it works worse below 50 MHz it goes all the way to 3.8 GHz if I remember correctly and in terms of the sample rate right now it works from about 2 MHz per second to about 50 MHz right now but again we're planning to get it to this number as we quoted okay, the microphone over there thanks for your talk did you manage to put your Linux kernel driver to the mainline? not yet, I mean it's not even fully published so I did not say in the beginning, sorry for this we only just manufactured the first prototype which we debugged heavily so we are only planning to manufacture the second prototype with all these fixes and then we will release the kernel driver and everything and I'm not sure we will try or maybe one try haven't decided yet thanks that will be the whole Azure experience okay, over there hey, it looks like you went through some incredible amounts of pain to make this work so I was wondering aren't there any simulators at least for parts of the system for the PCIe bus, for the DMA something any simulator so that you can actually first design the system there and debug it more easily yes, there are available simulators but the problems they are non-free so you have to pay for them so, yeah and we chose the hard way okay, thanks okay, we have a question from the signal angel are the FPGA codes, Linux driver and library codes and the design project files public and if so, did they post them yet? did we have posted them yet? can't find them on xtrx.io yeah, so they are not published yet as I said, we haven't released them so the drivers and libraries will definitely available, FPGA code we are considering it will also be available in open source but we will publish them together with the public announcement of the device okay, that microphone yes, did you see any signal integrity issues between the PCIe bus or on those bus to the LMS chip line microchip, I think that's doing the other did you try to measure signal integrity issues or because there were some reliability issues, right? yeah, we actually, so with PCIe we never had issues if I remember correctly, it was just working actually, the board is so small and when there is small traces there is no problem in signal integrity, so it's actually save us yeah, designing a small board is easier with the LMS7, the problem is not the signal integrity in terms of difference in the length of the traces but rather the fact that the signal degrades over speed in terms of voltage and drops below the detection level and like all this stuff, we used some measurements I actually wanted to add some pictures here but decided it's not going to be super interesting okay, microphone over there yeah, thanks for the talk how much work would it be to convert the 2x2SDR into an 8 input logic analysis in terms of heart and software so to have a really fast logic analyzer where you can record unlimited traces with logic analyzer so basically it's just also an analog digital converter and you largely want fast sampling and a large amount of memory to store the traces well, they just think it's not the best use for it probably I don't know maybe Sorgi has any ideas but I think it's just maybe easier to get a high speed ADC and replace the LIME chip with a high speed ADC to get what you want because the LIME chip has like so many things there specifically for RF yeah, the main problem is you cannot just sample original data you should shift it over a frequency so you cannot sample original signal and using it for something else except spectrum analyzing is hard okay, thanks okay, another question from the internet have you compared the sample rate of the ADC of the LIME DR chip to the USRP ADCs and if so, how does the lower sample rate affect the performance? so comparing low sample rate to high sample rate we have not done many testing we haven't done much testing on the RF performance yet because we were so busy with all this stuff so we are yet to see in terms of low bitrate versus sample rate versus high sample rate well, high sample rate always gives you better performance but you also get higher power consumption so I guess it's the question of what's more important for you okay, over there I've got a mixer bypass so you can't directly sample the signal is there a way to use the same antenna for send and receive yet? actually there is input for ADC but it's not a bypass it's a dedicated pin on LMS chip and since we are very space constrained we didn't erode them so you cannot actually bypass it okay, in this in our specific hardware so in LMS chip there is a special to rephrase a special pin which allows you to drive your signal directly to ADC without all the mixers, filters, all this radio stuff just directly to ADC so theoretically that's possible we even thought about this but it doesn't fit with design can I share antennas? because I have an existing laptop with existing antennas but I would use the same antenna for send and receive yeah, so I mean that depends on what exactly do you want to do if you want a TDD system then yes if you want an FDD system then you will have to put a small duplexer in there but yeah, that's the idea so you can plug this into your laptop and use your existing antennas that's one of the ideas of how to use X-tricks yeah, because that's all for connectors yeah, one thing which I actually forgot to mention like I kind of mentioned in the slides is that any other SDRs which are based on Ethernet or on USB can't work with CSMA wireless systems and the most famous CSMA system is Wi-Fi so turns out that because of the latency between your operating system and your radio on USB you just can't react fast enough for Wi-Fi to work because probably you know that in Wi-Fi you carry your sense and if you sense that the spectrum is free you start transmitting doesn't make sense when you have huge latency because you know that the spectrum was free back then so with X-tricks you actually can work with CSMA systems like Wi-Fi so again it makes it possible to have a fully software implementation of Wi-Fi in your laptop it obviously won't work as good as your commercial Wi-Fi because you will have to do a lot of processing on your CPU but for some purposes like experimentation for example for wireless labs and R&D labs that's really valuable thanks over there what PCB design package that you use? I'll film and I'd be interested in the PCI Express Workshop would be really great if you do this one would you say again? would be really great if you do the PCI Express Workshop PCI Express Workshop okay I think we have one more question from the microphones and that's you great talk and again I would appreciate the PCI Workshop if it ever happens what are the synchronization options between multiple cards? can you synchronize the ADC clock and can you synchronize the presumably digitally created IF? yes so unfortunately just IF synchronization is not possible because LIME chip doesn't expose a low frequency but we can synchronize digitally so we have special 1PPS signal synchronization we have lines for clock synchronization and other stuff we can do in software so LIME chip has fast correction registers so when you measure the phase difference so you can compensate it on different boards tune to a station a long way away and then rotate the phase until it aligns thank you a little tricky but possible so that's one of our plans for future because we do want to see like 128x128 MIMO at home okay we have another question from the internet actually we have two questions one is what is the expected price after prototype stage and the second one is can you tell us more about this setup you had for debugging the PCIe issues so you can repeat the second question it's setup debug more about the setup you had for debugging the PCIe issues second question I think it's most about our next workshop because it's a more complicated setup so we mostly remove everything about it in our current presentation yeah but in general in terms of hardware setup that was our hardware setup so we bought this PCIe express to Thunderbolt 3 we bought a laptop which supports Thunderbolt 3 and that's how we were debugging it so we don't need like a full-fledged PCIe we don't have to restart it all the time so in terms of price we don't have the fixed price yet so what Oleg can say right now is that we are targeting no more than your BladerF or HackerF devices and probably even cheaper for some versions okay we are out of time thank you again Sergei and Alexander


It is now time for oral questions and I recognize the leader of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition. Before I start, I want to wish everybody a happy Canadian Agriculture Day. It's a day that we celebrate our farmers and farm families for not only providing the food on our table, but great jobs and great fuel to our economy. Celebrate egg more than ever. My first question this morning is to our Premier. We know that residents of Ottawa particularly have lived through terrifying three and a half weeks under siege in our province and in our country's capital. Thankfully things are finally turning around, but we definitely need now to focus on moving forward. And I think the first step in doing that is to have this government acknowledge their role in letting that hate fester for three and a half weeks in the city of Ottawa and dividing this province. So my question to the Premier is he went out of his way to apologize to the occupiers. Will he now or has he yet had the opportunity to apologize to the people of Ottawa and the people of Windsor and if not will he do that today? Thank you, Speaker. Appreciate the opportunity to talk about what has been a very challenging time for many individuals in Ottawa, in Windsor, in Niagara and numerous other communities. It speaks to the value of working together and the fact that Chief Bell and the OPP and the RCMP and numerous other police agencies have been able to remove the illegal operation in Ottawa safely, carefully to ensure a minimum of injuries, speaks to the integrity, the professionalism of what we have seen with our frontline officers. It is incredible to me to see how well these officers have worked together from different agencies, from different police departments, and I am proud of the work that they have done and I am proud of the work that has happened as a result safely being able to deal with these illegal operations. Thank you. Supplementary question? Well, Speaker, the reality remains that this Premier had the tools to end this occupation much, much sooner and I think we are all grateful that it is over and for all the people on the front lines that helped to make that happen, we are all very grateful but this government could have acted sooner. We and others repeatedly called for the government, for this Premier to step up and revoke commercial vehicle operating licenses but the Premier said he couldn't and of course we all know that that wasn't accurate. It took the dump truck association to provide the proof that that wasn't accurate. This government could have protected our communities and protected our economy much, much sooner but they chose not to do so. So my question is why did the Premier not use the tools that he had to stop the occupation sooner rather than let them fester in Ottawa and in Windsor for three weeks? Mr. General. So again, Speaker, I will remind the member opposite that in fact the tools that the police have been using safely, professionally, carefully have been working. If there is anything that I regret about this instance is that a member of this parliamentary legislature was encouraging people to block 911 calls. If you want to talk about how we can do things better, we can make sure that individuals respect the rule of law, understand that there are opportunities, they were given multiple warnings, they were asked to leave, they were encouraged to leave, they were told what was going to happen if they did not leave, that has happened and again I will say it has happened safely. It's shameful that the government is not acknowledging that they had an important role to play here and they absconded when it comes to their responsibility. They were completely, completely MIA. But the bottom line is Ottawa is still going to need support and we know that the federal government is providing some financial support to businesses that were impacted and all businesses that I met with in Ottawa were very, very worried about the thousands of workers who are also impacted, who have also lost wages because of what happened for almost four weeks, over three weeks. In Windsor, uniform members were talking to me about the impact of the workers in the auto sector, manufacturing parts and other supply chain workers. The bottom line is they lost hours and they lost wages as well. So my question is, will this government step up now to support those workers who lost so much because they didn't move quickly enough and make sure that they are made whole because the Premier decided to sit on his hands and could have ended this sooner but chose not to. Mr. Penaes? Well thank you Mr. Speaker and it's nice to see everyone again in this house. Hello to all my colleagues. Mr. Speaker, many have been impacted by these numerous blockades and measures that Solicitor General mentioned were at various points illegal. Mr. Speaker, the families, the people who wanted to go to their jobs, the people who have the small businesses like in Ottawa have been impacted. There's no question about that. And that's why since day one we've been there to support the small businesses. We've been there with the small business grants who they are eligible for. We've been there with the property tax rebates and the electricity rebates which they are eligible for. We've been there for property tax and various provincially administered tax deferrals up to seven and a half billion dollars Mr. Speaker. But we recognize these are very unique circumstances and that's why I will have more to say in the very near future about supporting those businesses. Thank you Mr. Speaker. Thank you. The next question, once again the Leader of the Opposition. Thanks so much Speaker. My next question is also for the Premier. We all know that everything costs more than ever here in the province of Ontario. Folks are having a hard time making ends meet. Inflation is running at 5.7% but nobody's wages are going up like that. In fact the Premier has decided through Bill 124 that he is going to keep wages as low as possible. Fact folks, as was mentioned earlier, are going to be on the lawn today to protest that wrong-headed decision. But when it comes to gas prices Speaker, this Premier said regarding a $1.50 gas price that was happening in the election. He said and I quote, I can tell you that's not going to happen under our watch. Well, the government's own gasoline price tracker is showing that gas prices are in fact $1.59 in most of Ontario. In the north $1.63 is the price of gas. And in the meantime oil companies are flush with cash. So my question is why did the Premier break his promise to keep the price of gasoline below $1.50 a litre? Speaker, it is really rich to hear the Leader of the Opposition talking about affordability for the people of the province of Ontario when on every opportunity the Leader of the Opposition and her colleagues had the opportunity to vote with Ontarians, to vote with this government when we have reduced taxes for the people of the province of Ontario to put more money back in their pockets. Now when we said colleagues, you'll remember this, when we said that the carbon tax would cost the people of the province of Ontario too much, they fought against us, Mr. Speaker. We said it would cost too much. We said it would cost everything too much. The produce in your stores, Mr. Speaker, driving your kids to sports, Mr. Speaker, everything would be more expensive because of a carbon tax. They said that that wouldn't happen, but we're seeing that today, Mr. Speaker. We're seeing that today. Now over the next few months, as we have done over the last three years, we're going to work harder to put even more money back into the pockets of the people of the province of Ontario, Mr. Speaker. Some great announcements with respect to a val tax for the Minister of Transportation, removing tolls, Mr. Speaker, from the 412 and the 418, putting more money back on the people of the province of Ontario's pockets. And I'm sure... Thank you. Thank you. Supplementary question? Well, Speaker, the Premier said that he'd lower hydro bills by 12% as well. And of course, we all know that that hasn't happened. I quote, he said he was going to do that without shady accounting tricks. The FAO report, however, Speaker says that hydro has gone up every year since this Premier has been in office, including during the pandemic. The FAO says, and I quote, the government does not intend to lower electricity bills by 12% from 2018 levels. Despite spending billions and billions of dollars, the government continues to increase the price of electricity in this province, each and every year. So my question is, why did this Premier outright break his promise to reduce electricity rates for the people of Ontario by 12%? From the House Leader? Again, thank you, Mr. Speaker. What the FAO did say was that the price of electricity was coming down for the people of the province of Ontario. What he also highlighted, Mr. Speaker, was that the contracts that we had to take over, that we had to assume supported every step of the way by the Leader of the Opposition, these high price for electricity, for power that we didn't need, that we could not afford, again, Mr. Speaker, all in this attempt at reducing greenhouse gas emissions, when we knew that the reason we had the cleanest electricity sector in North America was because of the hardworking men and women who work in our nuclear sector, Mr. Speaker. That is what happened. That is why we were able to bring that down. And because of the hard work of our government back in the two thousands, Harris and Yves, to eliminate coal-fired generation, Mr. Speaker, to eliminate coal-fired generation, that is what's helped us on greenhouse gas emissions. And now, all of a sudden, the NDP and the Liberals care about people's pocketbooks. Give me a break, Mr. Speaker. And the final supplement. Oh, boy, Speaker, this member needs to take a history lesson or two. But nonetheless, I think we all saw, first day back in the legislature, last session of this term, and the gimmicks and promises are rolling ahead like they did before the last election. Unfortunately, the people of Ontario are still suffering. In fact, one of the promises that this Premier actually kept was one that is making the cost of rent for people skyrocket in Ontario. He said he would end rent controls in 2018. And boy, did he do that. Now, renters are facing rent increases of up to 25%. Can you believe that? 25%. Last week, a study showed that the average rent for a one-bedroom apartment in the province of Ontario in various cities was skyrocketing. In Hamilton, you had to earn $70,000 a year to afford a one-bedroom apartment. In Ottawa, $73,000 a year to afford a one-bedroom apartment. In Toronto, $90,000. That's more than two to three times the average wage of a minimum wage worker. So what is this Premier going to do to undo the damage of the one promise that he did keep and address the crisis of unaffordable rents in our province? And, Mr. Speaker, we're seeing across the province of Ontario for the first time in decades more rental housing being built. We're seeing that because we are taking action to ensure that we can bring housing online much more quickly, Mr. Speaker. But look again at affordability. We're seeing auto insurance rates come down in the province of Ontario. Not because of the stretch goals that the Leader of the Opposition wanted, but because of the policies of this government. We're seeing a reduction in taxes for the people of the province of Ontario, more money in their pocket. We've eliminated tolls. The only two parties to put tolls have been the NDP and the Liberals, Mr. Speaker. And we're seeing jobs come back. The Minister of Economic Development and Trade, Mr. Speaker, is bringing back jobs through the auto sector. The economy is starting to boom again, Mr. Speaker. And it's because of the policies of this government, despite the fact that they vote against everything and work so closely with the Liberals to destroy this economy. We came into power and made sure that they couldn't... Next question. Stop the clock. Please start the clock. Next question. The member for Ottawa Centre. Thanks, Speaker. Like others have done today, I want to begin my question, which is to the Premier, by acknowledging what our city in Ottawa has had to live through. An occupation that's lasted three weeks, that at one point involved over 500 vehicles, Speaker. And I have to admit through you, it's been tough for me to realise why my city became a target. A target of sabotage attempts in apartment buildings, including arson attempts, the locking of doors, the shutting off of water and electricity systems, of constant blaring of truck and car horns, and harassment of people walking in the street, verbal and physical for wearing masks. Speaker, I ask the Premier, why did this happen? Having talked to convoy participants myself and so many residents, I believe many people who are part of this movement were taken advantage of by extremists who convinced them that the source of their problems involved harassing Ottawa residents. And what I believe, Speaker, is hate and division grows when people feel unheard. Are cities pleased for help when unheeded by a response from this government for 14 days? As those 14 days elapsed, that hate grew. So my question through you, Speaker, to the Premier, why did it take you so long to happen? Why did you let this hate grow? Take your comments through the chair to reply to the Government, the Member for the Solicitor General, rather. Thank you, Speaker. There is no doubt that the City of Ottawa, the people of Ottawa have experienced a very challenging three weeks. However, it is the opposite to suggest that there was no involvement or engagement from the provincial government, from provincial resources, is categorically false. From the beginning, actually before the protests even appeared in Ontario, we were having through the OPP, through the RCMP, conversations with police chiefs of jurisdiction to ensure that all information, all intelligence was shared so that people could prepare. Now, if the member opposite is suggesting that there needed to be a role where we directed police, I respectfully decline that. Our job is to ensure that the police have the resources that they need to effectively do their job. And the fact that we had an operation that, again, came from the City of Ottawa, came from the RCMP, came from the OPP, had cooperation with police services from across Ontario, and in fact... Thank you. Thank you. The supplementary question. Thanks, Speaker. Speaker, I find that to be a really tiresome answer. We've had to, in this parliamentary session, talk about this government's relationship to people like Faith Goldie and Charles McVeedy. And let's add to the list. What about Pat King? People who've made their lives work hating on our Jewish neighbors, our Muslim neighbors, our queer, transgender and non-binary neighbors. Where has your repudiation of them been in 14 days? Order. I want to ask that question on behalf of small businesses and workers. Workers like Liv. Liv works at a coffee shop. Just a stone's throw away from Parliament, Speaker. There were anti-mask hate folks that came into her workplace, demanded protest and wouldn't leave until they were escorted to leave, and they hung around outside the door after, Speaker, trapping the workers inside the building. That's how toxic it was within the first day of this protest. Security officials told us this was coming. Will this government today, with us, as an entire legislature, commit to condemning this hate, working to deprogram it, rebuilding, healing our communities? That's what we need today, not words. Thank you. No, Speaker, our government has consistently condemned hate wherever it comes from and to whomever it is directed. But I want people to understand that in the city of Ottawa, in Windsor, in Niagara, we had coordination, we had participation. There is opportunities for us to learn from those and see how well coordinated police can work together. But to suggest in any way that this is somehow directed by a government, by individuals within government, I think really is beneath the member opposite. We did what we needed to do. We gave the police services the resources they needed through the emergency measures. We have pulled CVORs to ensure that individuals who are in these illegal operations were dealt with and dealt with quickly. So we'll continue to work with our police partners, but I want to underline and remind the member that this was an illegal operation that was dealt with appropriately. Thank you. Thank you, Speaker. My question is for the Minister of Economic Development, Job Creation and Trade. Ontario's automotive sector and the nearly 100,000 people employed by it are critical to Ontario's economy. Our auto sector is currently undergoing a transformational shift towards the production of electric vehicles, the car of the future. Can the Minister please inform this house how our government is making the necessary investments to ensure Ontario is a world leader in electric vehicle production? Good question. Development, Job Creation and Trade. Thank you, Speaker. Our government is committed to protecting Ontario's auto sector today while also investing in the technology of the future. That's why we were in Hamilton with the Premier last week to announce a generational investment in the largest private sector employer in the city. We were proud to announce $500 million of support for Arcelor Middle de Fasco's 1.8 billion dollar investment to produce green steel. With our support, AMD will replace their old coal-fired coke ovens and blast furnaces with new electric arc technology. This is a game changer speaker for Ontario's auto sector. You can't create the electric vehicle of the future with steel that's made from burning coal. Investments like these position Ontario's automotive sector and our supply chain are the success we know will happen. A supplementary question. For you, Speaker, I'd like to thank the Minister for that. This is a significant investment that will secure the economic future for Hamilton and the entire automotive supply chain. The link between green steel and Ontario's automotive sector is clear. Can the Minister update this House on what else Ontario is doing to secure the future of Ontario's automotive sector? Next is economic development. Speaker, we announced Phase 2 of our driving prosperity plan. Since then, Ontario's automakers have announced $6 billion in new investments. Over $4 billion of that is in electric vehicles. We are supporting these manufacturers. We are working day and night to support electric vehicle battery production right here in Ontario. In addition to the $500 million investment in green steel, we are investing $12 million in our automotive parts, tool, die and mold makers. We are also supporting our auto tech sector with $54 million to expedite electric driving developments. Finally, we are investing in our critical mineral sector where we will bring Northern Ontario into the automotive game for the first time in 120 years. The signal from our auto sector is clear. We will continue to produce the cars of the future and we are committed to supporting them. Thank you. Next question, the member for Parkdale High Park. Thank you, Speaker. My questions to the Premier. Every province and territory has signed the federal $10 day child care agreement except Ontario. Last week, the federal government revealed that they are still waiting for the forward government in order to access $10.2 billion in funding. Speaker, my question is simple. Does this government even have a plan? Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker. I appreciate the question from the member opposite. Of course, we said right from the beginning, Speaker, that we wanted to ensure that we had a child care plan that worked for the people of the province of Ontario. It had to be stable, it had to be long term funding, Mr. Speaker, that met the goals of a $10 day child care program. Surely the member opposite would all agree that we have to get to that point, Mr. Speaker. We have seen what federal promises have done in health, Mr. Speaker, when they promised 50% and then reduced it to 22% funding, Mr. Speaker. Order. We will not enter into a new program that does not give the people of the province of Ontario surety that they will continue to get. Order. They will continue to get the support that they need. Now, we're hearing the Leader of the Opposition hollering across the aisle. We've heard about stretch goals that accomplish nothing, Mr. Speaker. That is the history of the NDP in this place. For us, it's about publishing things for the people of the province of Ontario despite all of the hollering that gets nowhere. The Leader of the Opposition will come to order. Supplementary question. Speaker, through you, I say to the Minister, enough excuses to delay any further is the foreign government telling the people of Ontario that their political games are more important than helping families. If the government has the plan, as the Minister says, then why the stonewalling every other province and territory has managed to get this done, why not Ontario? Mr. Speaker, we have a significantly different childcare program than almost every other province in this country, Speaker, a program that was made ostensibly more costly and expensive for the people of the province of Ontario because of the policies of the previous Liberal government supported by the NDP who could not often enough get their hands in the pockets of the people of the province of Ontario. It wasn't enough that they increased taxes. It wasn't enough that they increased hydro rates. It wasn't enough that they drove away jobs. They also made it unaffordable to put your kids in childcare and now they're suggesting we should sign a deal that isn't guaranteeing a $10 a day. Just put our hands up and say we'll take care because the people of the province of Ontario can't afford to pay it. Well, I'm telling you they can't and that's why we will stand up for a childcare deal that works for the people of the province of Ontario that gives us long-term stability that ensures that we get to $10 a day. That's our goal. I'm surprised to hear that the opposition don't share the same goal. The next question, the Member for Cambridge. Speaker, my question is for the Premier. Last night the federal Trudeau Liberal has passed a motion to extend the continued use of special policing measures for a situation that no longer exists or requires them. The Conservative Party of Canada opposed the extension of these measures which gives the federal government the ability to freeze bank accounts and credit cards, put in police checkpoints and separate parents from children all without due process ordinarily given under the law. Why does this Ontario government continue to prop up Justin Trudeau this time by supporting the continued extension of these authoritarian and unwarranted special federal measures when the situation used to justify them no longer exists? Stop the clock. We had difficulty hearing parts of the question because the Member for Orléane was heckling loudly and the Member for Carlton was heckling loudly but ask you to come to order. Start the clock to reply on behalf of the Government. The Government House Leader. The Federal Parliament made a decision yesterday that was supported by the majority of the House of Commons. We will respect that decision but I think what you hear is the ongoing issues with respect to the COVID response. It has been very difficult as the Member for Ottawa said, people are frustrated and they are angry and we have to make sure we do a better job of understanding what that anger is about. We heard from farmers. Farmers were protesting from different families who were protesting. They were protesting the high cost of living some people were protesting the fact that a carbon tax put so much more costs on farmers and their ability to bring their food to market. There is a whole range of issues that these protests need to be addressed by our legislature across this country Mr. Speaker. Of course we will let the Federal Government make decisions on behalf of the Federal Government but ultimately we all have to do a better job of understanding what it is that brought people to Ottawa Mr. Speaker. Supplementary question. Premier Kenny of Alberta they both oppose the Trudeau Government's authoritarian special measures. Member Parliament Leslin Lewis who the Premier gave a Government appointment to on the Ontario Trillium Foundation said the Trudeau Government's special measures is about one thing to financially attack and silence people he despises for disagreeing with him. Even Premier Kenny who Premier Ford once stood shoulder to shoulder with announced Alberta is filing a court challenge against the Federal Government's special measures. Why won't this Government stop propping up the Trudeau Government and instead of being in the back pocket of the Prime Minister try standing up for Ontarians and join Alberta in court to challenge the Federal Government's unnecessary, destructive and authoritarian measures. To respond Government House Speaker. Again Mr. Speaker I think it is that type of language that helps to inflame and get people really misunderstanding how Government has responded to the COVID-19 crisis. Look first and foremost we want to ensure that the people of the province of Ontario were safe through the COVID crisis Mr. Speaker but let's be honest and let's be clear about what we saw in these protests all of us it doesn't matter who is in what side of the chamber all of us of course nobody supports the symbols of hate nobody supports the absolutely ridiculous aims of the protest organisers speaker. We're all on the same page on that. But let's be clear there were farmers there who were protesting the high cost of fuel. There were families who were there protesting the cost of living in this country of speaker. There was a whole other subset of people who were there for different reasons. Now we can continue to inflame that Mr. Speaker for I'm not sure why or we can look at what it was and what has caused people to go to Ottawa what has caused them to go to the ambassador bridge but make no mistake about it we will always stand up for law and order we'll always stand up for the authority of the state Mr. Speaker that is our job and we will continue to make sure that that happens. Thank you Mr. Speaker Mr. Speaker my question is for the minister of economic development job creation and trade. Mr. Speaker when our government took office Ontario had become a high cost jurisdiction manufacturers were leaving the province Ontario's economy and our families were suffering. Through you Mr. Speaker can the minister please outline how the previous government propped up by the NDP allowed this to happen and what our government has done to rebuild Ontario. Thank you Mr. economic development job creation trade. Speaker the previous government gave up on Ontario's manufacturing sector here are a few excerpts from thankfully what turned out to be their final report on the economy here's what they wanted to happen quote the structure of the Ontario economy will continue to shift from goods producing to service producing sectors in particular manufacturing to service sector industries they gave up on manufacturing they threw in the towel well we did not give up on our manufacturers instead we reduced their burden to regain our long held position as the economic engine of Canada. We will never give up on the people of Ontario like the previous government did supplementary Thank you minister through you Mr. Speaker most statements from the Liberals last report on the economy were shocking to hear a government that gave up on one of our most important sectors business owners in Ontario deserve to know that they have a government that will continue to have their back by making meaningful investments in Ontario businesses that are creating good jobs and helping to protect our economy so through you Mr. Speaker my question to the minister is our government taking to bolster the economy and reduce the cost of doing business in Ontario Thank you when our government took office we knew the cost of doing business under the Liberals was too high and that's why we moved very quickly to introduce policies that lowered the costs of doing business like lowering WSIB premiums without reducing benefits which resulted in the savings of over $2 billion annually so Ontario companies could write off new equipment in year that's a billion dollar savings every year we introduced eight red tape production bills and reduced the burden on business saving them nearly $400 million a year and the latest savings are the reduction of commercial and industrial hydro rates by 15 and 17 percent respectively Premier or Speaker these actions and more are saving businesses $7 billion each and every year and that's why businesses have a renewed confidence in Ontario Thank you very much Speaker and my question is to the Premier Speaker everyone knows that the last Conservative government made wrong decisions about the 407 toll route and now clearly this Conservative Government is too and the public both times is losing out According to a Toronto Star investigation published today there was a $1 billion congestion penalty from the operators of the 407 ETR toll highway last year we were told there was no congestion anywhere so there was no justification for collecting a congestion penalty but now we have proof of what everyone knew back then all the highways were congested except for the 407 ETR because the tolls were too high the tolls were too high because the Premier refused to enforce the contract why did the Premier give a gift to the private operators of the 407 toll highway while failing to relieve congestions on all the other highways Thank you very much Speaker and I'm happy to answer that question this morning and I'd like to welcome all my colleagues back to the chamber as well Speaker this last two years has been very difficult it's been some unprecedented circumstances that all Ontarians have faced they've had to comply with stay at home orders of COVID-19 and this resulted in the 407 invoking the relief clause under the contract with the Ministry of Transportation at the very beginning of the pandemic our government froze tolls on highways 407 East, 412 and 418 to deliver more relief for drivers and we will gladly compare our record on tolls with the Liberals supported by the NDP Speaker we have gone even further and we've recently announced the permanent removal of tolls on highways 412 and 418 but there's more to be done and that's why we are doing more this morning our government announced the elimination of tolls for drivers across this province this is real relief Speaker we're going to continue to support drivers across this entire province until we're back on that road to recovery and prosperity Thank you Speaker and again to the Highway 407 was so underused that a plane could land on it without difficulty a billion dollars is a lot of money to forgive imagine how much a billion could support existing infrastructure but even more interesting is the story that can be told if we allow congestion to grow instead of better utilizing the 407 this government is bent on justifying building the 413 through Hill and Dale the Premier would rather let the private operators of the highway keep collecting excessively high tolls from drivers than enforce the contract and maximize traffic flow throughout the highway network and as an excuse to waste 10 billion dollars of public money on an unnecessary new highway through the green belt whose main beneficiaries are friends and donors of this Premier so my question is this instead of wasting all of that money why won't the Premier simply make better use of the underused 407 highway that is already there and while he's at it, collect the 1 billion, thanks the associate minister so Speaker there's some puzzling contradictions in the question here on the one hand the members talking about congestion and how it affects Ontarians we agree in fact the GTA is going to grow to 8.5 million people in the next 10 years there's unprecedented growth on the way that means more congestion on our highways more need for transit system more need for highways and I think that's what the member is saying but I'm also hearing the members say it's been a very difficult time for Ontarians which means that people in this province need more relief and that's exactly why we would remove tolls on highways 412 and 418 that's why we're making life more affordable for drivers across this province by doing the things that matter to people's pocketbook speaker I don't blame people for wanting to move to this great province we're going to plan for the future unlike the Liberals and the NDP very much Mr. Speaker my questions for the Premier thanks to officers from Ottawa Ontario and across Canada the three week occupation of Ottawa has come to an end it should never have come to this lawlessness, intimidation threats to schools and lost paychecks the member from Ottawa Centre was right residents were not safe in their own neighbourhoods and for two weeks the Premier's message to those residents was you're on your own he wanted it to be somebody else's problem and on February 6th the Solicitor General said 100 OPP officers have been sent to Ottawa that number was closer to 150 it took a four day blockade in Windsor before the Premier took any action and speakers through you how can any community in Ontario have confidence that this Premier will be there for them and not abandon them the way that he did the people of Ottawa and Windsor in this situation thank you Solicitor General thank you Speaker when you actually do the math of how many officers there were per day over the course of the illegal operation you see that there was participation from RCMP from OPP from Peel from Toronto from Hamilton I could go on the point is Chief of Police in Ottawa worked with the OPP Commissioner they came up with an operational plan that was agreed upon by all three two commissioners and the Ottawa Chief and it was executed and again I have to say what is your option sir was your option that you expected political people to be interfering with policing operation I respectfully and categorically refuse that we need to have police doing their job as politicians we have absolutely given them additional resources supplementary question once again the member for Ottawa South come to order the member for Ottawa Vanya thank you Mr. Speaker I've seen this occupation first time in fact I was practically in the middle of it and I just want to say on the ground I didn't see these more officers the questions I've been asked the most by people in Ottawa is where has the provincial government been the businesses and workers have been feeling abandoned by their government workers that have lost their paycheck because they couldn't go to work business that had to remain closed because they couldn't open the residents of Ottawa the residents of Ottawa asking the government to step up to at least match the federal 20 million fund that is being offered provide IDRO bills forgiveness moratorium on evictions because business are worries so the minister of finance says help us on the way have more to say we're listening thank you Mr. Speaker and thank you to the member opposite for that very important question as I said earlier Mr. Speaker many businesses across Ontario in fact right across this nation have been impacted on the last two years and none more so than Ottawa in the last couple of weeks and so that's why it's important that we reiterate that they qualify and have qualified for the property tax rebate the electricity rebate by the way the portals still open portals are still open for the grants they still have the opportunity to defer the provincially administered taxes of which there are over a dozen of which add up to about 7.5 billion dollars that will be interest free and penalty free Mr. Speaker we've been there since day one for businesses over 6 billion dollars we'll continue to be there for businesses right across this great province including the businesses in Ottawa thank you very much thank you so much Speaker my question is to the minister of long-term care Speaker long-term care as a sector has been long neglected by successive governments between 2011 and 2018 the previous Liberal government only managed to build 611 net new beds that is an increase of only 0.8 percent while the population of Ontarians aged 75 and over grew by 20 percent Speaker that is only 611 beds for over 176 thousand people the citizens of Mississauga have long called on previous governments to deliver new long-term care beds that will serve the linguistic and cultural needs of our seniors and that is why I was so proud to recently welcome the minister and my Mississauga colleagues to my writing to announce an allocation of 128 beds by the sex ship organization of Mississauga the Coptic Church of Virgin Mary and Saint Athanasius this was a long awaited and absolutely phenomenal news Speaker through you can the minister please elaborate on our government's plan to fix long-term care Thank you very much let me just thank the honourable member for her hard work not only in helping secure this long-term care new long-term care facility she's been on the front lines and has been working every single day to make Ontario even a better place let me just congratulate all of the Mississauga members of parliament their hard work helped us secure funding and the ability to bring a new long-term care facility to the community and she referenced 128 new beds now again Mr. Speaker put that into contrast 128 new beds that is on top of the other announcements that we've made for new beds and upgrades it's over 1200 new and upgraded beds for Mississauga alone now the member is and it's not a mistake she isn't mistaken when she says that the previous Liberal government was only able to previous Liberal governments and in four of those years of course supported by the NDP only brought in 611 Mr. Speaker creating 30,000 new spaces for our seniors the supplementary question thank you Speaker and thank you to the Minister for that response 1251 beds is an incredible number and that's one bed shy of double what the previous government built in seven years and that's just in our city of Mississauga Minister we have heard from Ontarians across the province that meeting the linguistic and cultural needs of our seniors in long-term care is vital to ensuring their well-being that is why I was so proud to bring my motion on linguistically appropriate care last year and see it passed unanimously I also want to acknowledge the passionate work of my colleague the member from Mississauga Erin Mills who is an absolute champion for Mississauga's Coptic and Egyptian community and whose advocacy continues to be positively impactful for our city with this recent announcement we are continuing to consider the cultural, linguistic and spiritual needs of our seniors as we build these new homes back to the Minister can you please explain what is our government doing to ensure that seniors in Mississauga and across Ontario receive culturally and linguistically appropriate care actually a really good question because it's something that we heard right from the beginning from people across the province as much as it's important to bring you long-term care online it is also when a province is diverse as a province of Ontario it is also important to bring in culturally long-term care homes that respect people's culture that people can communicate in that's why I was very happy when the Mississauga team of course led by our first Coptic Christian ever elected Mississauga Erin Mills and the entire Mississauga team we didn't stop there the members from Brampton talked about the Hindu and Sikh community having a home specific for them we were able to bring that online Speaker the member for Mark and Soren Hill of course talked about the importance of the Chinese Canadian community in his community and in mine so we were able to bring that online Speaker it is actually shocking that the province of Ontario this wasn't something that we ever thought of Speaker so along with their hard work their quality of care second to none Mr. Speaker thank you the next question the member from north-south-western my question is to the Premier small businesses have struggled during the pandemic and I have heard many of those in my community of York-South-Western many have complained about the Ontario small business support grant program and the many difficulties navigating that program who North-Jong owner of Shells and Nills and Spa was forced to close due to the COVID restrictions and despite applying for the grant neither approval nor denied was received what is the government doing to address a grant program identified by the auditor general as a problematic situation here thank you the associate minister of small business and red tape production member opposite for his question speaker our government recognized that small businesses impacted by public health measures required immediate support so they could continue serving their communities and employing people across our province and our goal was to get money to these businesses quickly because we knew these employees were affected by these strengthened public health measures through the Ontario COVID-19 small business relief grant providing an additional $10,000 for eligible businesses speaker this builds on the nearly $3 billion that we provided last year through the Ontario small business support grant to over 110,000 businesses right across our province speaker this is an extraordinary historic level of support that went out to all of our small business and I have more to say in the supplementary thank you supplementary question thank you back to the premier here this is a letter I wrote to the minister of the economic development jobs and trade and we have no answer yet and my constituent took malicious notes of her interactions with the ministry and failure by the minister to respond in time or at all is unacceptable when we know that the government awarded 210 million to ineligible recipients how is it that who who did everything right could not even get a resolution to her application I'm calling on the government to review her case to determine what went wrong and will the minister also respond to my letter addressing this case as a new round of business support come online we need to ensure this mismanagement does not occur again Mr. Speaker thank you speaker once again thank you to the member opposite for the question Mr. Speaker I think it was just critical that our government as soon as possible got the funding out to the eligible businesses that applied through public health measures we had to close down a number of business including gyms restaurant for indoor dining and we wanted to make sure those who received the second round of grants previously we just sent them a very quick email where they were able to respond that they were still in business and that they were under 100 employees and the turnaround time to get that $10,000 to them was just a few days this is historic for any government the previous to be able to get money into the hands of those business who desperately needed them but not only that we allowed the business as they sold best this is their business they knew where they needed that money whether it was to pay for rent for taxes or anything else and we've responded in many other ways property tax relief many other areas in relief for them for example of PPE we gave them $1,000 for PPE thank you thank you very much the next question the member for as well thank you speaker my question is for the premier the health care system is hanging on by a thread nurses are at a breaking point feeling overworked underpaid and underappreciated the ONA says we're facing a nursing shortage of as high as 20% in hospitals ICU has reduced capacity because we don't have nurses to staff them the surgery backlog is getting worse because we don't have nurses to staff them this directly affects patient care nurses are at Queen's Park today asking for fair compensation fair wages and benefits like access to mental health supports and services so speaker will the premier do the right thing show nurses the respect they deserve and finally revoke bill 124 so new nurses can negotiate the compensation they deserve for working so hard caring for us thank you very much Mr. Speaker and our government is incredibly grateful for the contributions of Ontario's health care workers throughout this pandemic and our government has been there to support our health care system our health care workers throughout this entire pandemic and Mr. Speaker that is why this government has extended and over $342 million in the 2021 and 2022 to add over 5,000 new up-skilled registered nurses and registered practical nurses as well as an additional 8,000 personal support workers this included providing 500 registered nurses with specialized acute care training 420 registered nurses with an existing commitment for nursing Mr. Speaker our government's priority is the health and safety of all Ontarians and we have been singularly focused on ensuring that everyone is kept safe through this very much supplementary question back to the member opposite the government has been there to cap total compensation for nurses by 1% over 3 years given the inflation we're experiencing nurses are not only asking for fair wages they're asking for benefits such as access to mental health supports and services so after 2 years of the pandemic I can tell you all Ontarians are asking for additional access to mental health supports and services so Speaker if the government is going to clearly say no paying nurses a fair wage and fair benefits will the government at least say yes to my motion to make mental health care more affordable and accessible by expanding mental health care services coverage under OHIP and to the respond the Associate Minister of Mental Health and Addictions thank you Mr. Speaker and I'd like to remind everyone what we are in fact doing for our frontline workers since the beginning of the pandemic we've seen how significant the impacts have been on the mental health of Ontarians including the frontline healthcare workers that's why our government invested $12.4 million over 2 years to provide existing and expanded mental health and addiction supports for all frontline healthcare workers across the province and this investment will protect our progress in the fight against COVID-19 supporting the workforce in the acute care sector long-term care and home and community care sectors as well and that is what our intentions is to ensure that we do have these supports in place we also took actions to invest another $23.6 million to expand access to internet-based cognitive behavioral therapy to further support our frontline workers and over 70,000 people have subscribed to the program as well as 10,000 healthcare workers and we are doing everything we can to help support our frontline healthcare workers thank you the next question the member for Waterloo thank you very much Mr. Speaker my question is to the Minister of Education Mr. Speaker in an announcement yesterday that was months overdue the government said it would finally be providing HEPA filters for school and childcare settings two years into this pandemic we've known for some time that this goal to get indoor air closer to outdoor air with constant well-mixed ventilation and to lower CO2 as much as possible with the help of portable HEPA filters in order to keep students safe at school needs to happen we have all heard this from parents, from community leaders from medical professionals yet the government has operated with zero sense of urgency to get an adequate amount of HEPA filters to schools and to childcare centres Mr. Speaker the government explained why these 49,000 filters are only being sent to school boards now when we are over halfway through the school year and two years into this pandemic to respond the government has said it thank you very much Mr. Speaker of course we have we've known how important it is to improve air quality in our schools and in settings where we've provided over 8,000 HEPA filters speak of course the minister of community social services children community social services has been on the forefront of helping us better understand the importance of that in combating COVID Mr. Speaker having said that when it comes to our education sector actually 70,000 units have been delivered to schools across the province of Ontario so I'm uncertain as to where the member is coming from not only have 70,000 been delivered but we're actually increasing that by 3,000 because you know there are options additional options whether it's to ensure that units stay in the best condition to continue to provide service but as I said 70,000 of course the minister of government services has also been on the forefront of securing that I don't think there's a jurisdiction in Canada that has done better than these ministers have in helping keep our schools safe supplementary well let me help the house leader then Mr. Speaker for months the premier the minister of health minister of education wanted us to believe that schools already had these air filters and HVAC upgrades that they needed in fact last September the minister of education guaranteed that he had given school boards enough money and time to get mechanical ventilation or HEPA units into every classroom in my writing as recently as last week Thursday to be exact just one in five school board classrooms had HEPA filter units in every school school boards even had to go to such lengths as to fundraise for HEPA filters we are fundraising we're asking community members and teachers and educational staff to fundraise for basic health and safety measures in Ontario this has become a full-blown equity issue Mr. Speaker can the minister guarantee that these additional filters that were just announced yesterday every single school every single classroom every single child care centre will have the health and safety measures that they need and a HEPA filter in every classroom to apply the government I think it's worth noting that the opposition actually voted against these measures it is very rich to hear they're now suggesting well we should put HEPA filters in our classrooms we first provided 70,000 HEPA filters we're providing even more we've provided the tools whether it's rapid testing whether it's screening in our schools whether it's bringing vaccination clinics right into the schools so that our kids could have the safety and security that we all Ontarians have asked for and that has allowed us to move forward in education Speaker now of course it's not just about that moving forward we want to have the best quality of education in the country we want to move ourselves away from the legacy of the previous liberal government that saw our kids last when it came to science saw them last when it came to math we want to prepare them for the jobs of tomorrow and that is what we are doing and we can do that by making sure our schools are safe and that is what we have done in the pandemic that's what we're doing before the pandemic and we will continue to do for many years to come thank you speaker my question is to the premier Gildwood has been a COVID-19 hotspot throughout this entire pandemic including the most recent Omicron wave last week a peer reviewed article in the Canadian Medical Association Journal outlined what everyone in my writing already knows that areas in this province that face systemic inequities and social determinants of health and have vibrant black indigenous and other equity deserving communities with recent immigrants have higher rates of COVID-19 transmissions this article concludes that there needs to be a geographical prioritization of resources and services that are tailored to addressing these inequities speaker the science is clear people's lived experience and tragedies with COVID-19 have confirmed it will the premier follow the science and create tailored programs to address inequities in our province minister of health thank you very much to the member for the question as the member will know during the course of this pandemic we did target specific areas where we knew that there was a higher level of transmission that there were many issues that were involved we specifically targeted with more vaccination clinics and more opportunities for people to be vaccinated so that those inequities would not continue as a result we did see in many parts of Ontario where the areas that were targeted had higher rates of vaccination than other areas that is continuing now of course with the testing people can have access to the rapid antigen test because Ontario was able to secure a significant supply we have 5.5 million tests going out per week to 2,385 pharmacies and grocery stores across the province plus in community partners we have 500,000 tests per week those are going to places like community health centers homeless shelters and other places where we know that there could be that level of inequity that's where we're making sure that they get those volumes of tests to address those issues thank you very much that concludes our question period for this morning and I beg to inform the House that pursuant to standing order 101C changes have been made to the order on a list of citizens on the ballot list of positive members public business such that Mr. Manta assumes ballot item number 30 Ms. Beagram assumes ballot item number 33 Mr. Hassan assumes ballot item number 30 Mr. Manta assumes ballot item number 61 Mr. Bursch assumes ballot item 41 and Mrs. Gretsy bo- it right item 66 House stands in recess until 3 p.m.