New radio telescope receiver - and it's all on one microchip!

La Trobe University has signed a contract with Sydney-based semiconductor firm Sapphicon to help build one of the world's smallest and most advanced radio receiver microchips.

This follows the recent announcement that CSIRO and Sapphicon are jointly developing a complete radio receiver on a single chip measuring 5 x 5 mm for radio telescopes which could eventually also find a home in mobile telephones and other communications technologies.

The proposed receiver microchip is hailed as ideal for the $1.8 billion Square Kilometre Array (SKA) radio telescope - the world's first global radio telescope comprising a network of thousands of antennas straddling 3000 kilometres.

CSIRO and Sapphicon said the development of the low-cost, ultra-high-bandwidth, system-on-chip device could replace “traditional receivers currently used in radio astronomy applications - many of which are about the size of a bar fridge”.

The chip's first test will be in CSIRO's Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) - an array of 36 radio dishes that acts as a single telescope, now under construction in Western Australia.

The contract follows several years of collaboration by La Trobe University's Centre for Technology Infusion with Sapphicon and CSIRO on proof-of-concept projects relating to the new radio receiver.

This involved researchers from La Trobe, Peregrine Semiconductor Australia - now known as Sapphicon Semiconductor - and the CSIRO's Australia Telescope National Facility.

The collaboration produced a low-noise amplifier microchip, specially designed to address one of the SKA's most critical challenges - to minimise unwanted noise in the receiver so that radio astronomy signals from space can be more clearly distinguished.  For more information on the microchip, visit La Trobe's website.

Director of La Trobe's Centre for Technology Infusion Professor Jugdutt (Jack) Singh says the key design challenges for an application such as radio astronomy are “minimisation of losses in integrated passive components, integration of high-performance RF front end on a single chip with lowest noise possible and broad frequency band. The resulting microchip receiver design will have a very wide bandwidth of 1.1 GHz.”

Sapphicon Semiconductor's CEO, Andrew Brawley, says the chip will be developed using the company's silicon-on-sapphire complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor process.

“International researchers developing the SKA radio telescope are interested in the outcome of this R&D project. No other group is developing a fully integrated single-chip receiver for an SKA radio telescope,” Brawley said.

Researchers from the La Trobe Centre for Technology Infusion will be involved in the design and testing of this chip, which will be completed by the end of this year and become part of the ASKAP development project next year.