Indian signal processing contributions to development related to SKA

Abstract

The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) is the most sensitive Radio Telescope to be deployed in the most radio-quiet parts of the world: African and Australian deserts. The first phase of the project, SKA1  will commission up to 197 dish antenna arrays in South Africa and up to 1,31,072 element aperture arrays in Western Australia. Together, these arrays will observe over an extensive frequency range from 50 MHz to about 15 GHz. These arrays will produce very high volume imaging and non-imaging data streams and support exploring a variety of radio astronomy problems. Complex hardware forms part of the digital backend, namely the Tile Processing Module(TPM). We are involved in characterizing and developing firmware features to form multiple beams for the SKA-Low telescope. We also contribute to the accelerated pulsar search associated candidate sifting using High Performance SOC FPGA. In this talk, I will provide an overview of firmware features developed for SKA-LOW beamforming especially for FRB-like transient search point of view, and provide an update on how we plan to test using Gauribidanur Observatory facilities and also present challenges involved in candidate sifting during a search and present our approaches towards solving them.