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Low-Power Wideband Digital Spectrometer for Planetary Science

Award Information
Agency: National Aeronautics and Space Administration
Branch: N/A
Contract: NNX10CE01P
Agency Tracking Number: 094960
Amount: $99,881.00
Phase: Phase I
Program: SBIR
Solicitation Topic Code: S1.04
Solicitation Number: N/A
Timeline
Solicitation Year: 2009
Award Year: 2010
Award Start Date (Proposal Award Date): 2010-01-29
Award End Date (Contract End Date): 2010-07-29
Small Business Information
175 Clearbrook Road
Elmsford, NY 10523-1109
United States
DUNS: 103734869
HUBZone Owned: No
Woman Owned: No
Socially and Economically Disadvantaged: No
Principal Investigator
 Steven Kaplan
 Principal Investigator
 (914) 592-1190
 kaplan@hypres.com
Business Contact
 Oleg Mukhanov
Title: General Manager
Phone: (914) 592-1190
Email: mukhanov@hypres.com
Research Institution
N/A
Abstract

The purpose of this project is to develop a wideband digital spectrometer
to support space-born measurements of planetary atmospheric
composition. The spectrometer is based on a superconducting digitizer
and a digital autocorrelator. The digitizer will be able to handle the entire
6 -18 GHz band by operating above the Nyquist frequency (target: 30
GSamples/s). The superconducting circuits will be based on
Niobium-based Rapid Single Flux Quantum (RSFQ) technology. They will
be implemented without substantially impacting the cryogenic sensor
package. The data from the superconducting digitizer will be processed
by a 128-lag autocorrelator. During the Phase I performance period, we
will determine whether the autocorrelator is best implemented using the
RSFQ autocorrelator circuits we developed for the National Science
Foundation, or the polyphase implementation we recently produced using
fast FPGAs. The criteria for downselecting the best design will be the
projected Signal-to-Noise ratios and the relative added terms to the
system noise temperature.
Our choice of Niobium superconductor technology will enable one single
technology to implement the TerraHertz mixer, the digitizer, and the
fast manipulation of digital data on a low-power low-temperature platform.

* Information listed above is at the time of submission. *

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