Holistic Power Analysis of Implementation Alternatives for a Very Large Scale Synthesis Array with Phased Array Stations

The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) will be the largest radio telescope in the world, generating data at Pb/s rates. Real-time processing will require 10^18 compute operations per second, and system operating costs will be dominated by energy consumption. In this paper, we explore design options for the aperture array of the first SKA construction phase and provide lower bounds on their power consumption. We analyze the system’s components from the antenna front-end to the central signal processor and identify the main power consumers. We compare ASIC-based and FPGA-based data processing pipelines and show that ASICs can lead to 1.6 to 4 times more power efficiency.