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29-03-2010
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The Multiple Personalities of the UniBoard

Submitter: Team UniBoard
Description: The UniBoard project reached a milestone last week with the completion of the layout (thanks to the hard work by Gijs Schoonderbeek and Sjouke Zwier).

The UniBoard is a generic and versatile digital processing board that is being developed in an international collaboration as part of the RadioNet FP7 programme. With 8 state-of-the art FPGAs it is a true board-sized supercomputer. Combined with a large amount of memory per FPGA and a huge streaming capacity (160 Gbps I/O) it is particularly suited for radio-astronomical applications such as correlators.

JIVE and ASTRON are currently working on implementing EVN and APERTIF correlators on this board, as well as an APERTIF beamformer. Other groups are developing yet other board applications, such as a digital receiver and a pulsar binning machine.

The picture shows the 14(+4) layers of standard FR4 of the PCB, from top to bottom. The high-speed transmission lines (up to 10 Gbps) on layers 3, 5, 10 and 12 are shielded by four ground layers (solid purple). The 340x366mm board contains 7320 components with a total of 34.702 pins and 25678 connections.

UniBoard is developed under the RadioNET FP7 program. The Uniboard Research activity is led by Arpad Szomoru (JIVE). More information on UniBoard and the FP7 program can be found on:
http://www.radionet-eu.org/fp7wiki/doku.php?id=jra:uniboard
Copyright: Jive / Astron
 
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