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Yesterday's ADAP showed low frequency tests being undertaken at Parkes
with an 50--350 MHz MWA antenna.
Today's picture shows an MWA antenna outside the engineering labs
at Marsfield, where it is being used for
"Bluering" RF System-on-Chip (RFSoC) development.
The recent introduction of RFSoC devices is resulting in a
fundamental shift in the way digital back-ends are being designed for radio astronomy instruments.
The bringing together of 8 or 16 multi-Giga-sample per second Analogue to Digital Converters (ADCs) with
feature-rich Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) and quad-core ARM processors all on a single
chip has opened up new possibilities in high-performance, power-efficient RF sampling digital systems for radio
astronomy.
CSIRO's Space and Astronomy Technologies for Radio Astronomy group have developed
a new architecture for an RF sampling, multi-channel digital back-end for radio
astronomy applications. The new system, called Bluering, is designed to be scaled to suit the growing trend in
radio astronomy instrumentation towards large numbers of active receiving elements such as aperture arrays and
phased-array feed systems.
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