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News Release from: RF Engines
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial
Team on 25 February 2004
FPGAs turn to radio astronomy
RF Engines is helping the world-renowned Max-Planck-Institute for Radio Astronomy based in Bonn, with an FPGA-based, wideband channeliser design.
RF Engines (RFEL) is helping the world-renowned Max-Planck-Institute for Radio Astronomy (MPIfR) based in Bonn, with an FPGA-based, wideband channeliser design The radio-astronomy project involving the Max-Planck-Institute is for the development of a digital 40MHz real-time FFT spectrometer
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 21 Sep 2001 at 8.00am (UK)
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The new spectrometer is being designed to cover, typically, the low frequency ranges up to 3GHz, where there are often high levels of interference that adversely affect the performance of existing spectrometer techniques.
The MPIfR digital spectrometer design will achieve a continuous data flow and will have the ability to clip-out the affects of radio frequency interference (RFI).
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It is already being planned that the band of interest will be extended from the initial 40MHz concurrent bandwidth, up to 1GHz during the next few months.
RF Engines is supplying the complete system-on-chip IP core designs as separate "virtual components", which will be implemented on a Xilinx Virtex II 3000 FPGA.
This will allow the Institute to have the flexibility to adapt the final FPGA design to meet its requirement, so achieving the performance of the ASIC based approach, with the efficiency, flexibility and low cost of an FPGA based design.
John Summers, RFEL's VP of Sales and Business Development commented: "The Max-Planck-Institute are pioneers in the field of radio astronomy and we are very pleased to be associated with their move into a digitally based spectrometer design.
For this project we are supplying several individual cores for the customer to carry out the final implementation, since the cores can be very easily integrated and achieve a very efficient system-on-chip design, and far more cost effectively than 'building' the system using dedicated devices.
We are looking forward to seeing the results of the new spectrometer design, and then moving on to the next generation wideband systems".
Prof Dr Karl M Menton, Director for Millimetre and Submillimetre Astronomy at the Institute, added: "This is an exciting development programme that could have implications across the whole area of radio astronomy.
We are confident that by using the very latest FPGA techniques we will be able to massively improve the quality of our research, and without incurring the often very high costs of research and development that this work often incurs.
Many of today's frontline observations in radio astronomy are no longer limited by receiver technology, but rather by the lack of spectrometers with wide enough bandwidth at excellent resolution".
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