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ICE: A Scalable, Low-Cost FPGA-Based Telescope Signal Processing and Networking System

2016; World Scientific; Volume: 05; Issue: 04 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1142/s2251171716410051

2251-1725

Kevin Bandura, A. N. Bender, J.-F. Cliche, T. de Haan, M. Dobbs, A. J. Gilbert, S. Griffin, Gilbert Hsyu, David Ittah, Juan Mena Parra, J. Montgomery, Tristan Pinsonneault-Marotte, Seth R. Siegel, G. Smecher, Q. Y. Tang, K. Vanderlinde, Nathan Whitehorn,

Astronomy and Astrophysical Research

We present an overview of the ‘ICE’ hardware and software framework that implements large arrays of interconnected field-programmable gate array (FPGA)-based data acquisition, signal processing and networking nodes economically. The system was conceived for application to radio, millimeter and sub-millimeter telescope readout systems that have requirements beyond typical off-the-shelf processing systems, such as careful control of interference signals produced by the digital electronics, and clocking of all elements in the system from a single precise observatory-derived oscillator. A new generation of telescopes operating at these frequency bands and designed with a vastly increased emphasis on digital signal processing to support their detector multiplexing technology or high-bandwidth correlators — data rates exceeding a terabyte per second — are becoming common. The ICE system is built around a custom FPGA motherboard that makes use of an Xilinx Kintex-7 FPGA and ARM-based co-processor. The system is specialized for specific applications through software, firmware and custom mezzanine daughter boards that interface to the FPGA through the industry-standard FPGA mezzanine card (FMC) specifications. For high density applications, the motherboards are packaged in 16-slot crates with ICE backplanes that implement a low-cost passive full-mesh network between the motherboards in a crate, allow high bandwidth interconnection between crates and enable data offload to a computer cluster. A Python-based control software library automatically detects and operates the hardware in the array. Examples of specific telescope applications of the ICE framework are presented, namely the frequency-multiplexed bolometer readout systems used for the South Pole Telescope (SPT) and Simons Array and the digitizer, F-engine, and networking engine for the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) and Hydrogen Intensity and Real-time Analysis eXperiment (HIRAX) radio interferometers.