Olivia Young
U.S. Naval Research Laboratory
TreeBEARD: A Tree Dedispersion Algorithm for Radio Transients on Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs)
Broadband radio emission from transients such as pulsars and fast radio bursts is dispersed due to interactions with free electrons that comprise ionized media such as the Interstellar Medium, causing the emission front to be delayed in time as a function of frequency. These delays may be significant enough to completely obscure weak signals from detection, as is the case with most pulsed emissions from radio pulsars. Therefore, these delays must be corrected for through a traditionally computationally intensive process known as dedispersion. Tree Dedispersion dedisperses radio transient emission in a streamlined manner, exploiting redundancies in traditional approaches to increase efficiency. We implement a streaming-based approach to Tree Dedispersion by developing firmware applications for Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) to provide an energy and cost-effective alternative to current dedispersion methods implemented on GPUs or CPUs.
Using MatLab and Simulink, we test our Tree Dedispersion Board Embedded Algorithmic Reprogrammable Design (TreeBEARD) on simulated data and observations of the Crab pulsar. Using the Vivado-compatible Simulink application HDL Coder, we deploy our algorithm on several simulated and physical chips.