Processing high bandwidth signals in real-time
The AstroFFT Digital Spectrometer System makes use of the latest generation of Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA's) to perform the real time data processing required. There are a number of problems to be overcome when processing high bandwidth signals in real time. One of these is the actual data processing speed and the other is the speed of data communications. In the case of each AstroFFT processing engine, the input data is coming in at a rate of 200 MBytes per second and the 4096 point FFT algorithm together with power calculation and integration needs to be performed within 86 microseconds