22–26 Jul 2019
Milano
Europe/Rome timezone

ZCU111 RFSoC Characterisation, in the Context of a Cost Effective Microwave Readout System for MKIDs

23 Jul 2019, 17:45
1h 15m
Piazza Città di Lombardia (Milano)

Piazza Città di Lombardia

Milano

Piazza Città di Lombardia, 1, 20124 Milano MI
Poster Detector readout, signal processing, and related technologies Poster session

Speaker

Dr Colm Bracken (Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies)

Description

By lithographically structuring a thin film into arrays of low-loss micro-resonators, each with a unique resonant frequency in the GHz range, microwave kinetic inductance detectors (MKIDs) are inherently suitable for frequency-division multiplexed readout. State-of-the-art MKID arrays for optical/near-infrared detection require frequency spacing of ~ 2 MHz, allowing around 500 pixels to be read per GHz of RF bandwidth. As such, the Xilinx XCZU28DR RF-SoC/FPGA chip with its 8 x 4.0 Giga-samples per second (GSPS) ADCs could potentially digitise quadrature signals in I and Q from 8,000 MKIDs, albeit limited by the logic resources on the chip. A characterisation of the ZCU111 RF-SoC carrier board is presented in this talk, in the context of an RF-SoC MKID readout. One pair of the XCZU28DR’s eight on-chip DACS are analysed in I/Q for stability over time, with a waveform constituting a full-bandwidth frequency comb over +/- 2GHz. This frequency comb, representative of the excitation waveform for 2,000 MKIDs is then digitised with one pair of the on-chip ADCs, and fed through an on-chip polyphase filter bank (PFB) digital spectrometer for spectral analysis. Using this compact on-chip readout, I/Q measurements of a small array of prototype MKIDs are presented. The measurement results are compared to a Python-based MKID readout simulator which has been developed for time-efficient investigation of alternative MKID channelisation techniques. Finally, based on the logic resources utilised by the FPGA firmware design described herein, a discussion on the expected processing capacity of the RF-SoC is given, in terms of the maximum number of MKIDs that can be feasibly readout with the ZCU111 board.

Student (Ph.D., M.Sc. or B.Sc.) N
Less than 5 years of experience since completion of Ph.D Y

Primary authors

Dr Colm Bracken (Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies) Mr Eoin Baldwin (Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies) Dr Gerhard Ulbricht (Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies) Mario De Lucia (Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies) Dr Ivan Colantoni (Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Istituto di Nanotecnologica, Rome, Italy ) Mr Michael Moore (Dublin City University) Prof. Tom Ray (Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies)

Presentation materials