English

Back-End System of BURSTT

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics 2026-04-23 v2

Abstract

The Bustling Universe Radio Survey Telescope in Taiwan (BURSTT) is a new-generation wide-angle radio telescope specifically designed to survey Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs), energetic millisecond-duration pulses of unknown extragalactic origin. To realize its scientific potential, which includes detecting approximately 50 FRBs per year and sub-arcsecond localization capability, the system is designed to perform real-time beamforming and pulse search over the \SI{60}{\degree} ×\times \SI{120}{\degree} field of view. This paper provides a detailed account of the design, implementation, and performance validation of the BURSTT back-end System. The system employs an efficient multi-stage processing architecture: initial beamforming is executed on the Xilinx ZCU216 RF System-on-Chip (RFSoC) platform; data is then transferred to Intel Xeon servers, where AVX-512 and AMX instruction sets are utilized for the second stage of beamforming and channelization, achieving high computational efficiency to ensure real-time capability. A highly optimized \texttt{bonsai} de-dispersion algorithm performs a real-time pulse search and triggering across 256 beams, which, upon detection, issues commands to the distributed outrigger system to save voltage data for very-long baseline interferometry (VLBI) precise localization. System performance has been validated through beamforming tests using bright radio sources and real-time detection of known pulsars, confirming the high fidelity of the signal processing pipeline.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2512.07300,
  title  = {Back-End System of BURSTT},
  author = {Kai-Yang Lin and Chih-Yi Wen and Homin Jiang and Jen-Hung Wang and Sujin Eie and Shih-Hao Wang and Yao-Huan Tseng and Hsien-Chun Tseng and Daniel Baker and Ue-Li Pen},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.07300},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

accepted by PASP

R2 v1 2026-07-01T08:14:26.946Z