A digital broadband beamforming architecture for 2-PAD

Abstract

The development of densely-packed, all-digital aperture arrays is an important area of research 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 an hierarchical, frequency-domain beamforming architecture for synthesising a sky beam from the wideband antenna feeds of digital aperture arrays. In particular this work describes a specific implementation of the beamforming architecture to the 2-Polarisation All-Digital (2-PAD) aperture array demonstrator.