Back-End System of BURSTT

Kai-Yang Lin; Chih-Yi Wen; Homin Jiang; Jen-Hung Wang; Sujin Eie; Shih-Hao Wang; Yao-Huan Tseng; Hsien-Chun Tseng; Daniel Baker; Ue-Li Pen

arXiv · 2512.07300

Back-End System of BURSTT

Kai-Yang Lin·Chih-Yi Wen·Homin Jiang·Jen-Hung Wang·Sujin Eie·Shih-Hao Wang·Yao-Huan Tseng·Hsien-Chun Tseng·Daniel Baker·Ue-Li Pen

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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.

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BibTeX RIS

Kai-Yang Lin, Chih-Yi Wen, Homin Jiang, Jen-Hung Wang, Sujin Eie, Shih-Hao Wang, Yao-Huan Tseng, Hsien-Chun Tseng, Daniel Baker, Ue-Li Pen. 2025-12-08. Back-End System of BURSTT. https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.07300

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