Vignesh Raja Balu
Doctor of Philosophy, (Electronics and Communication)
Study Completed: 2021
College of Sciences
Citation
Thesis Title
Design of a Novel X-Section Architecture for FX-Correlator in large Interferometers
Read article at Massey Research Online: 
In large radio-interferometers, it is challenging to perform signal correlations at input data-rates of over 11-Tbps as this involves vast amounts of storage, memory bandwidt, hand computational hardware. Mr Balu addressed these big data issues by designing a dedicated correlator-system-multiplier and accumulator (CoSMAC) cell architecture based on real inputs from antenna arrays. The system utilises the flipped mirror relationship between Discrete Fourier transform (DFT) samples owing to the symmetry and periodicity of the DFT coefficient vectors. The proposed CoSMAC structure is thus extended to build a new processing element (PE) to calculate both cross and auto-correlations simultaneously. Furthermore, Mr Balu derived a novel mathematical model and a hardware design to calculate two visibilities per baseline for the Quadrature signals named as Processing Element for IQ sampled signals (PE_IQ). These three proposed dedicated correlator cells minimise the number of visibility calculations in a baseline.
Supervisors
Professor Rezaul Hasan
Associate Professor Khalid Arif