UniBoard achievements in Q1 + Q2

With all its manpower in place from the very beginning of the project, ASTRON has made excellent progress, and at the end of Q2 the schematic design of the board is ready to be reviewed. JIVE has mobilized several of its staffmembers to narrow down the hardware requirements for a next generation EVN correlator (by far the most demanding application of the project). With the hiring of a full-time digital engineer during Q2 the VHDL design effort at JIVE is also taking shape. INAF and BORD have made good progress with the digital receiver design, as has UORL with RFI mitigation work for the pulsar binning machine. Due to a heavy workload at Manchester, the UMAN group has not been able to start the actual work, although they have participated in meetings and discussions. This situation is about to improve, and a UMAN-UORL meeting is planned. KASI finally will only get involved during the hardware test phase, and may second an engineer for an extended period to assist the ASTRON engineers.

After careful discussions, both with vendors and partners, a choice was made for Altera FPGAs (in Q2). This choice was made both on the grounds of availability (the only competitor, Xilinx, would not be able to deliver a comparable product on the right timescale), cost and architecture. Even so, the total price of the boards will exceed the hardware budget, so all partners have agreed to pay an additional subsidy to the project, before delivery. An MOU to this effect is being drafted now (end of Q2).

Working documents:

• UniBoard for EVN: Block diagram and analysis Gijs Schoonderbeek, 13-3-2009
• UniBoard digital receiver design (draft) Gianni Comoretto, et al., 08-2-2009
• Draft for e-VLBI correlator, Paul Boven, 2009-03-13
• Draft discussion document re. Control Software Frameworks, Harro Verkouter, 2009-03-23
• UniBoard board design, Gijs Schoonderbeek, Sjouke Zwier, 29-5-2009
• Uniboard firmware development, Eric Kooistra, 5-06-2009
• Uniboard SVN draft database structure, Eric Kooistra, 24-06-2009

General activities in Q1:

• UniBoard kick-off meeting, Dwingeloo, February 26th - February 27th
• 2-weekly general telecons
• Meeting with KASI representatives in Dwingeloo directly following RadioNet FP7 kickoff meeting

Activities by institute in Q1:

ASTRON:

• 2-weekly ASTRON internal meetings
• Start of the system design for UniBoard
• Start of Hardware design for UniBoard
• Comparing the major FPGA players (Altera and Xilinx)
• Exploring PCB capabilities
• Exploring IO capabilites (optical 10GbE interface)
• Exploring Development platform (Modelbased design)

BORD:

• Work on the mathematical model of the filter bank design which includes the polyphase filter + 64 point FFT
• The model is electronic structure oriented in view of the actual design. Only a full scale representation was used so far; the quantization effect study is ongoing.
• In parallel, but relevant to the development of UniBoard, work on a new fast ADC continued (A. Baudry and P. Cais  with several other people not directly involved in UniBoard). Design of a Track/Hold circuit (65 nano techno) has been completed and sent to the foundry.

INAF

• Conceptual design of the Digital Receiver filterbank
• Draft design document, describing the structure and the general performances of the proposed design
• Resource estimate using simplified conceptual VHDL coding

JIVE:

• series of 4 2-weekly meetings with presentations on various software solutions for building a correlator control system
• regular meetings with ASTRON to narrow down specific hardware demands posed by EVN correlator application
• creation of web-based “Correlator construction kit”, allowing numerical comparisons of correlator output and computing demands of different EVN network configurations

UMAN:

• work had not started in Q1

UORL:

• Implementation of the RFI mitigation algorithm with Matlab
• Matlab simulation on synthetic data (see eusipco 2009 paper which is on the wiki)

KASI:

• work had not started in Q1

Problems / Issues

• Issues - organisational, administrative or other problems foreseen

• INAF reports a problem wrt funding. The engineer hired for the project is paid from local funds that will run out soon. Without a formal, signed, contract with the EC it will be hard to continue paying for this position.

• other institutes: none foreseen

Red flags - major problems

• none

Forward Look (Q2-Q3)

ASTRON:

• Start with PCB design (schematic)
• Selection of FPGA vendor
• Start exploring FPGA programming platform
• Finalizing Schematic Start layout
• Start Firmware design

BORD:

• Detailed investigation of quantization effects to prepare VHDL coding using the mathematical model
• VHDL coding (work shared with Arcetri)
• Refined design document including study results (work shared with Arcetri)

INAF:

• Design partitioning
• Computer interface model for the instrument control/monitor
• Refined design document including study results (work shared with BORD)
• VHDL coding (work shared with BORD)

JIVE:

• work on code for board testing (with ASTRON)
• exploration of FPGA programming platform
• start firmware design
• choice of software platform for correlator control system
• start design of correlator control system

UMAN:

• Meeting with UORL group
• Algorith modeling
• Algorith Implementation & Test
• Hardware Test

UORL:

• matlab simulation on real data (from Nancay telescope)
• study of the current pulsar machine in collaboration with Manchester (specific meeting(s) are planned)
• define the RFI mitigation algorithm architecture in collaboration with UMAN
• Matlab model of this architecture
• Test of this gold model on synthetic and real data

Expected milestones/ deliverables

• none until month 11 (design documents)

Expenditures - equipment, material and services

• In Q2 64 Altera Stratix IV FPGAs were ordered, as were 1 main and 2 companion 10GE IP licenses. Total amount involved $87680 for the FPGAs, $12500 for the licenses.
• In Q3 several manufacturers will be asked for offertes on board production

Person months spent/to be spent until next EC Report (charged to EC)

Q1/Q2+Q3

• ASTRON 1.2/6.6
• BORD 0/6
• INAF 1.8/9
• JIVE 0/4
• UMAN 0/1
• UORL 1/2

Number of Persons working in JRA

• 26, including part- and fulltime, both paid by UniBoard and matching