A low-power 416-lag 1.5-b 0.5-TMAC correlator in 0.6-mu m CMOS

The autocorrelation spectrometer is an important instrument for radio astro nomy. In satellite-based spectrometers, low power consumption is essential. The correlator chip presented in this paper reduces the power consumption more than five times compared to other full-custom designs. This has been a chieved by reducing the number of clocked transistors, using a compact layo ut of cells, which reduces wire lengths, and using parallel processing of d ata. Also, the low power performance is combined with a large number of lag s and a high data throughput. The correlator performs 0.5-TMAC operations i n 416 lags at a sample rate of 1.28-GSample/s with an input data precision of 1.5-b and a correlation period of one second. The chip is also designed to reduce noise generation by using multiple internal clock phases.