[asac] [almanews] ALMA September Monthly Report

[Carolyn White]

ALMA U.S. Monthly Report
Month End Sept 2000

The ALMA project continues to make progress toward readiness for the start
of construction. One significant step was made at a Joint Receiver Design
Group meeting in Cambridge England and a follow-up meeting in Tucson,
Arizona.  A complete top-level design for the Front-end subsystem was
agreed to and baselined. This top-level design is now the basis for all of
the detailed design work now under way and will lead to a Front-end
Preliminary Design Review in February 2001.

A major advance in the receiver components area has been the successful
demonstration of a 211-275 GHz mixer with 8 GHz IF bandwidth. By
integrating an IF preamplifier with an SIS mixer, good performance was
achieved over entire 4-12 GHz IF band.

Another area of major progress this month is the correlator. The first
prototype card for the FIR filter has been fabricated and is undergoing
tests. This card, which consists of surface mounted components, was
assembled at the Tucson ALMA Lab using our new surface mount prototyping
capability. This capability dramatically reduces the turnaround time and
cost for prototype surface mount boards.

The initial design for the custom correlator chip is complete. Extensive
testing of the computer model for this chip is underway prior to releasing
the design for fabrication early next year. The computer model predicts
the output of the chip for a large battery of test vectors to ensure
proper logical and timing performance.

In anticipation of Japanese participation in ALMA, the ASAC has begun to
study the scientific gains of possible enhancements to the baseline ALMA
scope. The goal is to establish a set of priorities should the addition of
the Japanese provide an opportunity to fund enhanced science capabilities.

Full September Report is available in pdf format at 

http://www.alma.nrao.edu/library/nsfreports/nsfsept2000.pdf
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