IBM said it will collaborate with the Dutch astronomical research institute Astron to produce analog and mixed-signal custom processor chips for use in a future interferometric radio astronomy project.
The Skads/Embrace telescope planned for a distributed site between northern Netherlands and France, will represent a scaled prototype of a 3,000-km telescope project called the Square Kilometer Array.
SKA will build upon radio interferometry concepts developed for the U.S.-based Very large array, and in a global project centered in New Mexico called the Very long baseline array. The two projects succeeded in upgrading radio astronomy from single-dish antennas, prompting 11 nations to sponsor the SKA project, which will consist of thousands of discrete antennas located in Australia and South Africa.
If the processing and materials costs for each antenna node can be reduced, planners said SKA could grow from the 25,000 antennas used in Skads/Embrace to as many as 100 million antennas in a full SKA.
IBM will use its 8HP 0.13-micron SiGe process to integrate RF circuits directly on a mixed-signal chip. Multiple processors will be embedded on antenna tiles, which will filter data from radio signals coming from deep space, as far back in space and time as 13 billion light years.
Scheduled to be completed by 2020, the full SKA would operate over a range from 100 MHz to 25 GHz. It is still uncertain whether each antenna element will be small-dish, flat synthetic-aperture arrays or dishes with phased arrays at the dish foci. New Mexico's VLA uses 27 dishes each measuring 25 feet in diameter.