Daily Image

07-09-2015
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Boards ready for Apertif Correlator Subrack testing.

Submitter: Gijs Schoonderbeek
Description: The APERTIF correlator will use 16 UniBoards to correlate the signals from 12 WSRT telescopes for all 37 beams over 300MHz bandwidth. These 16 UniBoards will be placed in two subracks. To enable this configuration, two new boards had to be made, OEB and CoBI.

The Uniboard contains 8 FPGAs, only 4 of which have standard optical interfaces. To facilitate the other 4 with optical interfaces as well, the OEB (Optic to Electric Board) was designed. It contains optical connectors to receive 12 fibers from 12 telescopes (representing a single polarization). Each fiber link transports 10Gbps. On the EOB, the optical signals are converted to the electrical domain and demultiplexed to 48 streams of 3.125Gbps. These can be easily handled by a UniBoard, each of which will have one OEB.

On the CoBI (Correlator Backplane Interface), eight UniBoards, eight OEBs and a PAC (Power and Clock) can be plugged. A CoBI has the same dimension as the backplane of the Apertif beamformer, so the same subrack can be used. With all boards placed in the subrack, CoBI will transport 1.2Tbps.

The picture shows a Uniboard and PAC in the front, the OEB in the back and the CoBI that connects them in the middle. More information about the Correlator can be found in the daily image of 02-02-2015. http://www.astron.nl/dailyimage/main.php?date=20150202)

Sieds Damstra (layout CoBI), Sjouke Zwier (layout OEB), Daniel van der Schuur (firmware design) and Gijs Schoonderbeek (schematic design).
Copyright: ASTRON
 
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