A Wideband, Four-Element, All-Digital Beamforming System for Dense Aperture Arrays in Radio Astronomy

Densely-packed, all-digital aperture arrays form a key area of technology development required for the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) radio telescope. The design of real-time signal processing systems for digital aperture arrays is currently a central challenge in pathfinder projects worldwide. We describe interim results of such work; an heirarchical, frequency-domain beamforming architecture for synthesising a sky beam from the wideband antenna feeds of digital aperture arrays.