The spectrometer is built on a Berkeley Wireless Research Center (BWRC) BEE2 (Berkeley Emulation Engine) platform. Originally designed for high-end reconfigurable computing applications such as DSP and ASIC oriented towards radio astronomy applications was developed as a collaboration between the BWRC, the UC Berkeley Radio Astronomy Lab, and the UC Berkeley SETI Group. The system consists of three main components: the main BEE2 processing board, a high-speed ADC board for data digitization, and an IBOB for high-speed serial communication betweenthe two boards.
BEE2 Board
The BEE2 board integrates high computational density with high-speed I/Os. Compute power is provided by its 5 Xilinx XC2VP70 Virtex-II Pro FPGAs (Field- Programmable Gate Array), each containing 328 18x18-bit multipliers, 2 PowerPC cores, 5904Kb of SRAM, and over 74,000 logic cells. In addition, each FPGA can be provided with up to 4GB of DDR2-SDRAM. External interfaces are available through 10Gb/s InfiniBand connections on the user FPGAs, as well as 100Mbps Ethernet and RS232 serial ports through the control FPGA.
ADC Board
Analog data is digitized using an Atmel AT84AD001B dual 8-bit 1Gsample/s ADC. The ADC can be driven with either single-ended or differential inputs, and can digitize either 2 streams at 1Gsample/s or a single stream at 2Gsample/s. The board is designed to mate directly to an IBOB board for high-speed serial data I/O.
IBOB Board
IBOB (InfiniBand BreakOut Board) boards allow a variety of I/O cards to provide data for packetization onto the InfiniBand protocol. Each board provides 2 Z-DOK+ connectors for I/O card attachment, and 2 CX4 InfiniBand connectors for interface to BEE2 boards. Data serialization is done by a Xilinx XC2VP50 FPGA. The FPGA provides 232 18x18-bit multipliers, 2 PowerPC cores, 4176Kb of SRAM in addition to 36Mbit of on-board ZBT SRAM, and over 53,000 logic cells, allowing the IBOB to pre-process data before handing off to the BEE2.