FPGA-based emulator for functional verification of radio frequency interference mitigation algorithms

Modern day radio-telescopes need extremely sensitive receivers combined with powerful signal processing capabilities. Rapid urbanization and proliferation of communication devices has made these telescopes vulnerable to increasingly high levels of Radio Frequency Interference (RFI). This has necessitated development of algorithms for the mitigation of the effects of RFI either in real time or during post processing. The performance of different algorithms can be verified using RFI emulator. The paper proposes a programmable and versatile RFI emulator architecture optimized for hardware platform for generating the signals with different types of interference as received by the wide-band signal processing chain. The design parameters for this RFI emulator have been arrived at as an optimal trade-off between the functional requirements and hardware utilization. The implementation of RFI emulator has been carried out on FPGA and the results of built-in testing of RFI mitigation logic using RFI emulator are provided.