The Square Kilometre Array Mid SPFRx receiver/digitizer Qualification Model testing

The Single Pixel Feed Receiver (SPFRx) has been developed for the SKA1-Mid dishes by the National Research Council (NRC) Canada in cooperation with the University of Bordeaux, France. The SPFRx takes pre-amplified SPF Radio Frequency (RF) signals in two polarities and converts the RF into digital samples. The RF conditioning component of RXS applies bandpass filtering, spectrum leveling, and variable gain amplification to prepare for sampling by Analog to Digital Converter (ADC) devices. The ADC-produced RF samples are processed by a digital processor based on a System-on-Chip Field Programmable Gate Array (SoC FPGA). The FPGA firmware assembles RF samples into network packets and streams the data from each Dish over a dedicated 100 Gigabit Ethernet link to the SKA Central Signal Processing (CSP) facility. In this paper, we outline the design of SPFRx hardware, firmware, and software and present the test results for SPFRxB123 Qualification Model, a pre-production SPFRx for SKA MID bands 1, 2, and 3.