KEYWORDS: Pulsars, Radio telescopes, Analog to digital converters, Radio astronomy, Electromagnetic coupling, Field programmable gate arrays, Receivers, Digital signal processing, Telescopes, Spectroscopy
SKARAB is the acronym for Square Kilometer Array Reconfigurable Application Board, a digital platform that was initially designed for the MeerKAT digital correlator. Being equipped with a reprogrammable chip like a Virtex7 FPGA, SKARAB is a not application-specific computing node 19’’ 1U dimension, thus suitable to be employed for single-dish applications as well. Here we present a SKARAB pulsar machine that has been engineered and built for the Sardinia Radio Telescope (SRT, Italy). The high dynamic range provided by the high-performing ADC mezzanine card (which provides digital samples coded with up to 16 bits) coupled with the SKARAB guarantees a proper functionality also in presence of strong Radio Frequency Interference (RFI), and the 4x40G I/O mezzanine card allows handling data rates up to 160 Gbit/sec.
Both pulsar search and pulsar timing are provided in different bandwidths and number of channels; we also present on-field results that we have achieved at the Sardinia Radio Telescope by observing the pulsar B0355+54 at 5 GHz.
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