Digital Correlation Spectrometer for APSERa - Evolution and Trends

The advancement of modern field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) have revolutionized the development of spectrometers with high-resolution and high dynamic range, enabling validation of sig-natures from the recombination epoch. Improvements in process technology have led to higher FPGA density and performance, allowing for the parallelization of algorithms required for wide bandwidth spectrometers in cosmology applications. The Raman Research Institute has embarked upon building the Array of Pre-cision Spectrometers for the Epoch of Recombination (APSERa), a radiometer designed to detect adjacent lines from the Recom-bination epoch in the 2–6 G Hz frequency range. This paper showcases the development of a correlation spectrometer by implementing signal processing algorithms on in-house developed digital platforms, integrating FPGA-GPU technology, and using a state-of-the-art Radio-Frequency System-On-a-Chip evaluation platform, along with the laboratory results obtained.