Design of RFSoC-based Digital Phased Array Feed (PAF) and Hybrid Architecture Beamforming System

Abstract

As the number of array elements and bandwidth increase, the design challenges of the Phased Array Feed (PAF) front-end and its signal processing system increase. Aiming at the ng-PAF of the 110 m radio telescope, this article introduces the concept of fully digital receivers and attempts to use Radio Frequency System-on-Chip (RFSoC) technology to digitize close to the feed array, reduce the complexity and analog components of the front-end, and improve the fidelity of the signals. The article discusses the digital beamforming topology and designs a PAF signal processing experimental system based on RFSoC+GPU hybrid architecture. The system adopts a ZCU111 board to design RF-direct digitization and preprocessing front-end, which can sample eight signals up to 2.048 GSPS, 12 bit, channelize the signals into 1024 chunks, then reorder into four data streams and select one of the 256 MHz frequency bands to output through four 10 Gb links. A GPU server is equipped with four RTX 3090 GPUs running four HRBF_HASHPIPE instances, each receiving a 64 MHz bandwidth signal for high-throughput real-time beamforming. The experimental system uses a signal generator to emulate Sa-like signals and propagates through rod antennas, which verifies the effectiveness of the beamforming algorithm. Performance tests show that after algorithm optimization, the average processing time for a given 4 ms data is less than 3 ms in the four-GPU parallel processing mode. The RFSoC integrated design shows significant advantages in power consumption and electromagnetic radiation compared with discrete circuits according to the measurement results.