Superconducting Digital-RF Receiver with High-Speed Data Recording Capability

A superconducting digital-RF receiver with high ingest-rate data recording capability has been developed. The data recorder unit uses standard PC components with state-of-the-art solid-state drives and interfaces with the superconductor analog-to-digital converter (ADC) through a commercial FPGA board. High-speed data ingest rates exceeding 3.2 GBps have been demonstrated successfully with single-bit ADCs clocked up to 27.52 GHz. Long data acquisitions are useful for analyzing ADC performance in terms of stability and linearity. A data analysis program has also been developed to extract performance parameters and visualize digitized signals in frequency and time domains.