Firmware improvements of the Tile Processing Module for the low frequency aperture array of the square kilometer array

Abstract

The Low Frequency Aperture Array (LFAA) component of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) involves the processing of 262144 Radio-Frequency (RF) signals in the 50- 350 MHz band by means of 8192 Tile Processor Modules (TPM) connected through a 40G Ethernet network. Each TPM is responsible for processing 32 RF-over-fibre (RFoF) signals including optical-to-electrical conversion, digitisation, channelization, beamforming and transmission of the processed beams to Central System Processing (CSP) over a 40G Ethernet network. The TPM hardware platform has recently been updated to version 1.6 with an upgrade of the FPGAs, ADCs and on-board DDR memory, allowing the baseline FPGA firmware to be improved with new features including an enhanced polyphase filterbank (PFB), raw antenna data buffer and comprehensive health monitoring.