An Integrated Circuit for Radio Astronomy Correlators Supporting Large Arrays of Antennas

Journal of Astronomical Instrumentation

K. KUEHN¹  R. HUPE² 

[1] Argonne National Laboratory, Lemont, IL 60439, USA;Department of Physics, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210, USA

关键词: Radio astronomy;    correlators;    arrays;    integrated circuit;    ASIC;   

DOI  :  10.1142/S2251171716500021

学科分类：天文学(综合)

来源: World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.

【 摘 要 】

Radio telescopes that employ arrays of many antennas are in operation, and ever larger ones are being designed and proposed. Signals from the antennas are combined by cross-correlation. While the cost of most components of the telescope is proportional to the number of antennas N, the cost and power consumption of cross-correlation are proportional to N2 and dominate at sufficiently large N. Here, we report the design of an integrated circuit (IC) that performs digital cross-correlations for arbitrarily many antennas in a power-efficient way. It uses an intrinsically low-power architecture in which the movement of data between devices is minimized. In a large system, each IC performs correlations for all pairs of antennas but for a portion of the telescope’s bandwidth (the so-called “FX” structure). In our design, the correlations are performed in an array of 4096 complex multiply-accumulate (CMAC) units. This is sufficient to perform all correlations in parallel for 64 signals (N=32 antennas with two opp...

【 授权许可】

Unknown