A Real-Time Beamformer on a Radio Frequency System-on-Chip for Bustling Universe Radio Survey Telescope in Taiwan

We constructed a beamformer in a Xilinx radio frequency system-on-chip (RFSoC) field-programmable gate array ZCU216 board with a channelizer for the Bustling Universe Radio Survey Telescope in Taiwan. We utilized the RFSoC board to substantially reduce the processing power required to form beams, thereby reducing the required number of CPU cores or corresponding accelerator electronics. The RFSoC unit accommodates 16 analog-to-digital channel inputs, sampling data at 1600 MHz at a bandwidth of 800 MHz. Sixteen signal inputs are processed independently with a polyphase filter bank and fast Fourier transform. After frequency domain data were obtained, a 16 × 16 weight factor matrix was used to perform the initial round of beam forming. Once 16 beams were generated, we combined the data for all 16 channels, then packetized the data and sent them to a server through a 100 Gbps Ethernet connection for a second round of beamforming. This study demonstrated that the RFSoC chip can be used in radio astronomy to create a phased system and beamformer.