Low Power FPGA Based Spectrometer, Phase I

We propose to design a general purpose reconfigurable wide bandwidth spectrometer for use in NASA's passive microwave missions, deep space network and radio astronomy. In Phase I, we will design and build a low power, low cost real time FPGA based spectrometer board that will analyze a 3 GHz bandwidth signal with 16,384 channels. Utilizing 3 Gsample/sec 8 bit ADC's and Xilinx Virtex 4 FPGA's, the proposed spectrometer can also be configured to analyze a pair of signals with 1.5 GHz bandwidth each, or four signals of 750 MHz bandwidth each. A Polyphase Filter Bank (PFB) will be implemented instead of a large FFT, because the PFB has excellent out of band rejection ($> 80$ dB), preventing strong RFI from contaminating adjacent bands. In Phase II, we will space qualify the spectrometer, provide significantly higher bandwidth capabilities, and add high speed output, and consider an ASIC implementation for lower-power space-based applications. Techne instrumentation has flown on Rosetta, PERSI, and several soundong rockets. More »