Date of Award

Winter 12-10-2022

Author's School

McKelvey School of Engineering

Author's Department

Computer Science & Engineering

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Degree Type

Thesis

Abstract

The Advanced Particle-astrophysics Telescope (APT) and its preliminary iteration the Antarctic Demonstrator for APT (ADAPT) are highly collaborative projects that seek to capture gamma-ray emissions. Along with dark matter and ultra-heavy cosmic ray nuclei measurements, APT will provide sub-degree localization and polarization measurements for gamma-ray transients. This will allow for devices on Earth to point to the direction from which the gamma-ray transients originated in order to collect additional data. The data collection process is as follows. A scintillation occurs and is detected by the wavelength-shifting fibers. This signal is then read by an ASIC and stored in an ADC buffer. This buffer is then formatted as a data packet with a meaningful header and stored in memory that is accessible by an FPGA. This is where the data must be preprocessed before being sent on to the CPU for the localization algorithms. This preprocessing includes capacitive memory pedestal subtraction and taking four trigger-relative time integrals per channel. There are 16 channels per ASIC. The HLS implementation of this FPGA data preprocessing seeks to answer the following questions. How well can HLS map this naïve C preprocessing model to an FPGA image? What HLS optimizations are most useful for this application? What are the reported latencies of these optimized models? How much chip area is consumed by each of these designs? How many ASICs can be processed by one FPGA?

Language

English (en)

Chair

Roger Chamberlain, CSE Department

Committee Members

Jeremy Buhler, James Buckley

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