Interconnection Technology of FPGAs Array in Large-scale Radio Detection System

Multi-channel digital correlator based on field programmable gate array (FPGA) has been an important component of antenna array radio astronomy detection system. However, as the scale of the antenna array keeps increasing, the amount of signal processing operations grows in a square relationship and exceeds the processing capacity of a single-FPGA. In this paper, we propose a system architecture for a digital correlation processor, which is an extensible multi-node interconnection structure with a hierarchical cascade. High throughput and instruction interaction based on electrical or optical connections was realized between nodes using high-speed transceivers. The flexibility and scalability of the whole system were improved by designing modular logic firmware, standardized data transmission, and control interface protocol. The architecture effectively solves the problem of multi-node data distribution and aggregation in a large-scale correlation system. And it realizes massive real-time correlation processing operation.