| Name: Akshaya V G |
| Affiliation: Raman Research Institute |
| Conference ID: ASI2026_772 |
| Title: RFSoC-Based Digital Correlation Spectrometer for APSERa |
| Abstract Type: Oral |
| Abstract Category: Facilities, Technologies and Data science |
| Author(s) and Co-Author(s) with Affiliation: Akshaya V G(Raman Research Institute, Bangalore - 560080, India), Srivani K S(Raman Research Institute, Bangalore - 560080, India), Girish B S(Raman Research Institute, Bangalore - 560080, India), Mayuri S Rao(Raman Research Institute, Bangalore - 560080, India), Keerthipriya S(Raman Research Institute, Bangalore - 560080, India), Kamini P A(Raman Research Institute, Bangalore - 560080, India) |
| Abstract: The Epoch of Recombination is a pivotal period in cosmological history, during which the hot plasma of the early Universe cooled and transitioned into an atomic state. Cosmological Recombination Radiation (CRR) lines that are emitted by the process of the formation of the first atoms over this era appear as faint additive ripples in the Cosmic Microwave Background.
APSERa, the Array of Precision Spectrometers for the Epoch of Recombination, is an upcoming cosmology experiment aimed at detecting CRR over 2-4 GHz where the sensitivity for a ground-based detection is expected to be the highest. On completion, APSERa will comprise a 128-element array with custom-designed antennas and cutting-edge electronics.
The prototype digital receiver for APSERa employs a Xilinx ZCU111 evaluation board based on Radio Frequency System-On-a-Chip (RFSoC) at the core of its Digital Correlation Spectrometer. This board includes eight high-speed 12-bit ADCs, each capable of sampling at up to 4.096 GSPS, of which two ADCs are used – each digitizing a signal having a bandwidth of 2 GHz. The correlation spectrometer is realized inside the RFSoC and leverages parallelism by implementing an F-engine comprising a 16384-point split-FFT architecture (M*N) through a combination of sixteen parallel, pipelined streaming 1024-point FFT IP cores, complex multipliers for phase correction, and a custom-designed 16-point parallel FFT engine. X-Engine performs complex multiplication and accumulation to produce two autocorrelation spectra and one cross-power spectrum, with an on-chip integration time of about 16.77 ms. The data is then streamed out via 1-gigabit Ethernet interface to a laptop for data acquisition and further processing.
In this talk we present the architecture of the digital correlation spectrometer for APSERa, implemented on the RFSoC, along with the accompanying results. |
