Real-Time Implementation of MAD-Based RFI Excision on FPGA

Radio Frequency Interference (RFI) excision in wideband radio telescope receivers is gaining significance due to increasing levels of manmade RFI and operation outside the protected radio astronomy bands. The effect of RFI on astronomical data can be significantly reduced through real-time excision. In this paper, Median Absolute Deviation (MAD) is used for excising signals corrupted by strong impulsive interference. MAD estimation requires recursive median calculation which is a computationally challenging problem for real-time excision. This challenge is addressed by implementation of a histogram-based technique for MAD computation. The architecture is developed and optimized for Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) implementation. The design of a more robust variant of MAD called Median-of-MAD (MoM) is described. The architecture of MAD and MoM techniques and subsequent optimization allows for four RFI excision blocks on a single Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGA. These techniques have been tested on the GMRT wideband backend (GWB) processing a maximum of 400 MHz bandwidth and the results show significant improvement in the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR).