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Design

The ALMA Correlator is being built to accommodate 64 antennas. There are 8 baseband inputs per antenna, each with a maximum sampling rate of 4 GHz (2 GHz bandwidth) digitized at 3-bit 8-levels. The signal is digitized and transmitted over fiber optic cables to the correlator. Station cards provide bulk delays suitable for a 30 km range. At the digital FIR filter, bandwidths and fine delays are set using 4-bit quantization before being passed at 2-bit 4-levels through packetization to the 2-bit 4-level correlator. The resulting bandwidths per baseband input range from the 2 GHz maximum down to 31.25 MHz, providing 512 channels of 31.25 MHz resolution over 16 GHz at the lowest resolution broadest spectral range setting, and 15.3 kHz at the highest full polarization spectral resolution. For single polarization work, 1.9 kHz can be obtained. Details are given in ALMA Memo. No. 194. Power estimates have decreased by 25% from the numbers in the project book, where further details may be found. The cost of the full ALMA correlator will be $13M.



Al Wootten
2000-10-10