Neways to manufacture Lofar electronics upgrade

Astron, the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy, has awarded a tender for the supply of 328 Uniboard2 units to Neways in Leeuwarden. The UniBoard2 upgrade makes the Lofar radio telescope suitable for processing more and faster data. Neways has already performed the “design for experience” analyses and is now allowed to produce and test these complex printed circuit board assemblies. The total order value is 3 million euros and the project will start in July 2020.

The Uniboard has been developed to implement signal processing such as filter banks, beamformers and correlators for enormous amounts of data, such as Lofar generates. It’s equipped with standard interfaces and can be used stand-alone or multiple boards can be combined through a backplane to build larger systems. The Uniboard1 contains eight 40nm Altera Stratix IV FPGAs, capable of processing 160 Gb/s of data. This first generation was also manufactured by Neways.

The Uniboard2 successor uses the latest generation of FPGAs on the market. It’s part of the digital upgrade project for Lofar, called Dupplo, that has been awarded to Astron by NWO, the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research. The upgrade allows multiple forms of astronomical research to be conducted in parallel and related to each other, opening up new possibilities for groundbreaking science.