A Multichannel Digital Real-Time Correlator as Single FPGA Implementation

The measurement of light scattering represents a scientific method for the analysis and investigation of submicron particle structures. The key principle of this approach is to extract tempo spectral information from light scattered using correlation techniques. In this paper we present a multichannel correlator architecture, which integrates 32 correlators on a single chip and thus allows the real-time processing of up to 32 independent input channels. The combination of a fast front-end with a highly optimised soft-core processor leads to a time dynamic range from 5ns up to several hours for every single correlation channel. The underlying algorithmic concepts and the software/hardware design considerations for the system-on-a-programmable-chip (SOPC) will be outlined.