The ITASEL/SETI-Italia new programmable spectrum analyser
- Paper number
IAC-06-A4.1.08
- Author
Dr. Stelio Montebugnoli, INAF - National Institute for Astrophysics, Italy
- Coauthor
Ing. Luca Zoni, INAF - National Institute for Astrophysics, Italy
- Coauthor
Dr. Jader Monari, INAF - National Institute for Astrophysics, Italy
- Coauthor
Dr. Claudio Maccone, Member of the International Academy of Astronautics, Italy
- Coauthor
Prof. Dr. Cristiano Cosmovici, IFSI/INAF, Italy
- Coauthor
Dott. Daniele Biancu, Italy
- Coauthor
Mr. Salvatore Pluchino, Visiting Research Fellow, IRA-INAF Radiotelescopes, Italy
- Coauthor
Mr. Nicolo Antonietti, Politecnico di Torino, Italy
- Year
2006
- Abstract
SETI-Italia (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) activities are going on since 1998 at the Medicina 32 mt dish, in piggy back mode, exploiting the peculiar features of the Serendip IV system. Due to the availability of advanced computing silicon engines (Digital Signal Processors -DSP), a fast, high-performance reconfigurable data acquisition system is under development within the ITASEL program, which is supported by the Italian Space Agency (ASI). The system is at present being designed at the Institute of Radioastronomy in Medicina (Bologna). It is planned to be powered by very fast programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). The spectrometer will offer - for each board with a maximum of 4 boards / crate PCI - a 100 MHz input bandwidth with a programmable number of channels, ranging from 256 to 64 millions (real time). Since, among other employments, this device can be programmed to operate as a high resolution spectrometer, it will also be aimed at achieving very accurate SETI observations, besides being efficiently employed in the search for emission lines (Spectrometry). Therefore it will be possible to perform several different activities with a single programmable back end. It will be possible also to implement fast algorithms - already tested on a CPU cluster - for the KL Transform computation. This transform is known to be extremely suitable for detecting any kind of modulated ETI signal.
- Abstract document
- Manuscript document
IAC-06-A4.1.08.pdf (🔒 authorized access only).
To get the manuscript, please contact IAF Secretariat.