Digital signal processing hardware for a fast fourier transform radio telescope

21-cm tomography is a devoloping technique for measuring the Epoch of Reionization in the universe's history. The nature of the signal measured in 21-cm tomography is such that a new kind of radio telescope is needed: one that scales well into very large numbers of antennas. The Omniscope, a Fast Fourier Transform telescope, is exactly such a telescope. I detail the implementation of the digital signal processing backend of a 32-channel interferometer designed to help characterize the non-digital parts of the system, starting at the point analog signal enters the FPGA and ending when it is written to a file on a computer. I also describe the accompanying subsystems, my implementation of a scaled-up, 64 channel design, and lay out a framework for expanding to 256 channels.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2012

Author dc:creator

• Losh, Jonathan L

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Max Tegmark.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/77447

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/77447