UniBoard is in production

During the last two years, scientists and engineers from various institutes across the world developed a generic digital board (UniBoard) as one of the joint research activities of RadioNet.

Last week, their work climaxed in the production of the first board. It passed X-ray, Optical inspection and Boundary Scan. The factory is now busy finalizing the last inspections and tests before delivery.

The researchers eagerly await the arrival of eight boards at ASTRON/JIVE (Dwingeloo, NL) in the first week of April 2011 from where they will be distributed to the various partners.

This board will provide as much computing power as will fit on a reasonably sized PCB, in the form of a large number of state-of-the-art FPGAs, yielding up to 4 Tops (Tera-operations per second). The board will communicate with the external world using a large number of high-speed links. It will enable new capabilities for a next generation of instrumentation, crucial for the future of the RadioNet facilities, as well as serve as a Peta-operations test bench for SKA development.