FPGA spectrometers for GALFA and SETI at UC Berkeley Jeff Mock;
Berkeley CA, USA
Dan Werthimer at UC Berkeley has developed a long series of spectrometers for SETI applications over the last 25 years. The performance of these spectrometers has followed Moore's Law in both performance and cost. The current generation spectrometer under development uses a common virtex-2 FPGA hardware platform for the GALFA project at Arecibo, SERENDIP-V for SETI, and other applications.
To facilitate engineering of spectrometers for a range of applications, we developed software tools that generate efficient verilog for FFTs and polyphase filter banks (PFBs). These tools allow us to optimize the number of channels, filter characteristics, bit widths, and other characteristics for a particular application. We can quickly generate a transform optimized for a particular purpose. These software tools are open-source, and the only requirements are other open-source tools.
I'll provide an overview of the main applications for the hardware platform and our development process for building systems with FFTs and PFBs. I will describe our hardware architecture for computing the transforms, and how this maps onto projects using this hardware.
Talk outline:
- Quick history of spectrometers for SETI at UC Berkeley FFTs versus PFBs as multi-channel filters GALFA and SERENDIP-V overview Hardware platform Efficient two channel complex FFTs Code generation tools for FFTs and PFBs Resource utilization in FPGAs Verification strategy Performance of hardware, comparison with previous generations Other applications for the hardware platform: pulsars, CSIRO