Ethernet Receiver Design at ASTRON

About

At ASTRON, the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy, we are designing a new generation of radio telescopes. Traditionally, coaxial cables have been used to transport signals from the antenna to the processing facility. For our future telescopes, we aim to replace coaxial cables with optical fibre interconnects. This change requires a synchronised ADC to be implemented close to the antenna, with the clock reference and data transmitted over the fibre. In radio astronomy, where weak signals are measured and multiple antennas form large arrays, low noise and maintaining high synchronisation are crucial.

We are exploring this concept through two projects: MID4Automotive and Future Network Services (FNS). Our focus areas within these projects include shielding digital noise from sensitive analogue circuitry and ensuring precise synchronisation. Within the MID4Automotive project, we are building a prototype capable of operating up to 100 MHz bandwidth, suitable for a future LOFAR update. For synchronisation, we will employ White Rabbit technology. Within the FNS project, we are designing an Ethernet receiver operating up to 2.5 GHz bandwidth.

In this talk, we present the design choices of the ADC clock tree and how White Rabbit technology is used to synchronise the local sampling clock to the central clock. We will show the first results of the 100 MHz Ethernet receiver. Additionally, we will outline our plans for the next phase, which involves using an AMD RFSoC synchronised with a White Rabbit clock circuit..

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