The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) will be the biggest radio telescope ever built, with unprecedented sensitivity, angular resolution, and survey speed. This paper explores the design of a custom architecture for the central signal processor (CSP) of the SKA1-Low, the SKA's aperture-array instrument consisting of 131,072 antennas. The SKA1-Low's antennas receive signals between 50 and 350 MHz. After digitization and preliminary processing, samples are moved to the CSP for further processing. In this work, we describe the challenges in building the CSP, and present a first quantitative study for the implementation of a custom hardware architecture for processing the main CSP algorithms. By taking advantage of emerging 3D-stacked-memory devices and by exploring the design space for a 14-nm implementation, we estimate a power consumption of 14.4 W for processing all channels of a sub-band and an energy efficiency at application level of up to 208 GFLOPS/W for our architecture.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.