Wide-Band Spectrometers at the Caltech Submillimeter Observatory

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The Caltech Submillimeter Observatory (CSO) is designed to operate in the 200-900 GHz band. Future high-sensitivity studies of both star-formation regions and galaxies will require a spectral-line detector array. The technological development of most of the required elements, such as detectors and preamplifiers is reasonably well-advanced, but no convenient solution exists for a flexible, wide-band spectrometer with low power-dissipation, volume, cost and high reliability, suitable for replicating to 25 or more elements. This award will support the development of a custom-Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) correlator of at least 1 GHz bandwidth and 200 independent channels. It will have roughly 10 times the performance of existing designs due to the high packing-density and high speed of the proposed custom-VLSI technology. Most of the correlator components will be on one integrated circuit, and therefore the multi-element replication process will be much simpler and cheaper than with alternative designs. The anticipated volume and power consumption are a factor of 10 less than for the best available alternatives. This factor makes the spectrometer array feasible. This project makes use of the DARPA/NSF MOSIS Facility.