Signal Processing for Deep-Sea Observatories with Reconfigurable Hardware

The recent evolution of deep-sea observatories has provided the infrastructure for studying rare phenomena in astroparticle physics, extended phenomena in physical oceanography and environmental monitoring for climate modeling and civic alert systems. The observatories involve sets of sensors distributed in the deep-sea, which transmit data through Gbit electro-optical lines to a shore station for real-time processing. Each set of sensors communicates data and control with the shore station through a readout system. Targeting the improvement of the observatory, the current paper proposes a readout system with enhanced functionality, which includes the ability to reconfigure the communication channels, provide statistic measurements of the communicated data and efficient data filtering. The design of the architecture is suited for FPGA implementation and the instantiation on the Xilinx ML605 board validates the results.