Capacity of the cognitive radio network degrades due to the interference constraint from the primary network. The secondary network capacity can be enhanced in a cost effective way by means of spatial diversity, that can be achieved by adding multiple antennas on the secondary network terminals and performing antenna selection. In this paper, the performance of a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) secondary link with transmit antenna selection (TAS) at the transmitter and maximum ratio combining (MRC) at the receiver is analyzed. A peak transmit power constraint at the secondary transmitter is considered in addition to the interference power constraint and two scenarios are considered; 1) the MIMO cognitive system with TAS/MRC (MCS-TM) does not experience interference from the primary network (denote by MCS-TM-NI), and 2) MCS-TM does experience interference from the primary network (denote by MCS-TM-WI). The performance of both MCS-TM-NI and MCS-TM-WI is analyzed and, for a Rayleigh faded channel, closed-form expression for the outage probability is derived. In addition, closed-form expressions of the moment generating function, the symbol error rate and the ergodic capacity are obtained for the MCS-TM-NI. Asymptotic performance analysis of the MCS-TM-NI reveals that TAS/MRC in a MIMO cognitive system achieves a generalized diversity gain equal to the product of the number of transmit and receive antennas. Numerical results are also presented to corroborate the derived analytical results. © 1991-2012 IEEE.