A Wideband, Four-Element, All-Digital Beamforming System for Dense Aperture Arrays in Radio Astronomy

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel wideband, four-element all-digital beamforming system designed for dense aperture arrays in radio astronomy, addressing key challenges in real-time signal processing for large-scale telescopes.

Contribution

It introduces a hierarchical, frequency-domain beamforming architecture specifically tailored for wideband digital aperture arrays in radio astronomy.

Findings

Demonstrated effective beam synthesis from wideband antenna feeds

Addressed real-time processing challenges in dense aperture arrays

Provided interim results for scalable beamforming architectures

Abstract

Densely-packed, all-digital aperture arrays form a key area of technology development required for the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) radio telescope. The design of real-time signal processing systems for digital aperture arrays is currently a central challenge in pathfinder projects worldwide. We describe interim results of such work; an heirarchical, frequency-domain beamforming architecture for synthesising a sky beam from the wideband antenna feeds of digital aperture arrays.