The University of Oxford, a member of the Low Frequency Aperture Array consortium, which is working with the Square Kilometre Array Organisation to build the world's largest radio telescope, has signed the second phase of a study contract with RFEL. This new contract focuses on the design of an FPGA based signal processing architecture for beam forming functions in the antenna processing hardware.
The first phase of the study concentrated on designing a maximum performance, minimum complexity, channeliser for subdividing the radio spectrum. RFEL is now investigating whether its beam forming IP, used to image distant sources, can be combined with the channeliser to further boost performance and minimise resource usage.
Alex Kuhrt, RFEL's CEO, said: "We are delighted to continue working on this international project in such a key role. The SKA will comprise thousands of dish telescopes and hundreds of thousands of dipole antennas. Each dipole antenna will have two of these channelisers – one for each polarisation – to process the signals. It is therefore vital to keep the power requirement and cost of each processing card to a minimum, which is our speciality."
RFEL is also considering using its ChannelCore Flex architecture, with its flexibility to arbitrarily define the centre frequency, bandwidth and sample rate of potentially thousands of independent radio channels to ensure that all available processing resources and data bandwidth are used to maximum effect.
Author
Graham Pitcher
Source: www.newelectronics.co.uk