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Low-Power Wideband Digital Spectrometer for Planetary Science
Title: Principal Investigator
Phone: (914) 592-1190
Email: kaplan@hypres.com
Title: General Manager
Phone: (914) 592-1190
Email: mukhanov@hypres.com
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. *