Project Details
Projekt
RADIANT - Radio Astronomy with Low-Complexity Sensors
Applicant
Dr.-Ing. Manuel Stein
Subject Area
Electronic Semiconductors, Components and Circuits, Integrated Systems, Sensor Technology, Theoretical Electrical Engineering
Term
from 2019 to 2020
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 413008418
A new low-frequency radio telescope is just about to start operation and challenge our perspective on the universe and the fundamental laws of physics. With more than 100,000 antennas, the low- frequency receiver of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA-low) forms a technology milestone in radio astronomy and, together with its predecessor Low Frequency Array (LOFAR) featuring approximately 5,000 antennas, constitutes the completion of a paradigm shift towards an all-electric telescope system design. Instead of using a few large parabolic antennas, with the help of supercomputers the SKA-low and LOFAR combine the signals from a massive number of small sensors and synthesize giant low-frequency radio telescopes by smart digital algorithms.While this allows astronomers to perform surveys at unparalleled sensitivity and speed, massive digital sensing as realized today in low-frequency radio astronomy forms an engineering challenge. Due to the enormous number of sensors, the SKA-low produces more data than the worldwide internet, requiring huge quantities of optical fiber, ultra-large memory, and high-performance processing units. While the technological capabilities regarding digital transmission, storage, and computation have exponentially increased during the last decades, the advances associated with analog radio equipment were moderate. Therefore, today hardware cost and power consumption of radio sensors form the main obstacles for constructing future telescopes combining millions of antennas.The project investigates a potentially game-changing approach. The analog complexity of the radio sensors is reduced to its minimum by allowing highly nonlinear behavior. Innovative hardware-aware statistical signal processing methods compensate the undesired effects in the digital domain and an optimized system design with a maximum number of sensors ensures ultra-high performance. Uniting world-class engineers for radio astronomy systems and leading scientists in array signal processing as well as hardware-aware statistical analysis for an initial study of opportunities, the research endeavor aims at: I) quantitatively understanding the potential of radio telescopes with a large number of low-complexity sensors; II) deriving the required high-performance signal processing and data compression algorithms; III) providing proof-of-concept with real radio telescope data sets; IV) planning the verification with a high-performance low-complexity radio telescope prototype.
DFG Programme
Research Fellowships
International Connection
Netherlands
