Development of Pulsar Digital Backend Based on RFSoC
Abstract Radio Frequency System on Chip (RFSoC) offers great potential for implementing a complete next generation signal processing system on a single board for radio astronomy. We designed a pulsar digital backend system based on ZCU111 board. The system uses RFSoC technology to implement digitization, channelization, correlation and high-speed data transmission in the Xilinx ZU28DR device. We have evaluated the performance of the 12-bit, 8 RF-ADCs, which are integrated in RFSoC, with the maximum sampling rate of 4.096 GSPS. The RF-ADC sampling frequency, channel bandwidth and the time resolution can be configured dynamically in our designed system. To verify the system performance, we deployed the RFSoC board on the Nanshan 26-meter radio telescope and observed the pulsar signal with a frequency resolution of 1 MHz and time resolution of 64 us. In the observation test, we obtained pulsar profiles with high signal-to-noise ratio and accurately searched the DM values. The experiment results show that, the performance of RF-ADCs, FPGA and CPU cores in RFSoC is sufficient for radio astronomy signal processing applications.