The top priority for increasing the science capability of ALMA is to
improve the speed survey by expanding the instantaneous bandwidth. As
explained in the ALMA development Roadmap, “Any receiver upgrade that
increases the IF bandwidth must be accompanied by an upgraded signal
transport chain to digitize the receiver output and transfer the data to
the correlator”. We report on the work done by the electronics group
from LAB to upgrade the following sub-systems:
- DG: to digitize 16 GHz of bandwidth, per polarization, and per
sideband,
- DTX-DRX: to transfer the digital data from the antenna to the
correlator,
- TFB: to ensure backward compatibility with the baseline correlator,
as well as the next generation correlator (planned for 2030).
We describe our baseline solutions in terms of technology and devices,
the Digital Signal Processing architecture from the digitized IF to the
correlator, and our design and demonstration plans.
