RFEL supplies core for Arizona Radio Observatory

RFEL, the Isle of Wight signal processing specialist, is supplying one of its HyperSpeed FFT IP cores to the Arizona Radio Observatory (ARO).

Jul. 21, 2016, Jul. 21, 2016 – 

They are developing a new high performance radio astronomy spectrometer system where RFEL's core forms a key component to improve sideband separation in their heterodyne receivers. To support the receiver's wide signal bandwidth, the core utilizes parallelism to operate at a high input data rate of over 10 Giga samples per second.

"Radio astronomy is a perfect example of how our expertise can provide solutions that cannot be found elsewhere,"says Dr. Alex Kuhrt, RFEL's CEO, "radio telescopes generate huge amounts of data that have to be processed without loss to extract signals. This requires specialist skills to create solutions that can handle this amount of data whilst retaining the mathematical precision. Our HyperSpeed FFT core is configured to match the demanding research needs of the ARO giving them the throughput and performance required."

A fixed length, 8192-point, complex Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) is implemented using RFEL's HyperSpeed architecture, with an internal complex data parallelism of 32, which will be clocked at 160 MHz. The input bit format is 12-bit signed twos complement and the input data is subject to a time-domain window function with user-programmable coefficients, allowing flexible selection of window types. The bit width will increase to 18 bits at the output of the core.

 Back