Status of ALMA Band 7 Cartridge Production

摘要

The Atacama Large Millimeter/Sub-millimeter Array (ALMA) will be composed of at least 65 high-precision antennas. In this framework, IRAM is responsible for the production (component procurement, assembly and test) of 65 production + 8 spare state-of-the-art receivers, covering the 275-373GHz frequency range, called the ALMA Band 7 cartridges. Some of the challenging issues that were solved during the design and prototyping of the cartridge, and early experimental results were presented at a previous ISSTT. The first production cartridge was delivered in Spring 2009. The last receiver (65th) has to be provided to the project before the end of 2012. Currently, half of the production cartridges have been delivered and accepted by the project. Every single cartridge has to go through thorough preliminary acceptance tests to make sure that they all meet the specifications imposed by the project. In order to achieve such a level of quality with high delivery rate, some product (PA) and quality (QA) assurance processes had to be put in place and fully automated test setups had to be implemented. We will briefly describe the cartridge, then the PA/QA processes and present the test setups together with the main performances of the production cartridges delivered so far.