The telescope's low-noise amplifiers are built with components adapted from the cellphone industry and its data are processed using a custom-built FPGA electronic system and 1000-processor high-performance GPGPU cluster.

[2] About seventy percent of the Universe today consists of so-called dark energy that counteracts gravity's attractive force and causes this acceleration.

CHIME is in the process of making precise measurements of the acceleration of the Universe to improve the knowledge of how dark energy behaves.

CHIME's daily survey of the sky will enable study of our own Milky Way galaxy in radio frequencies, and is expected to improve the understanding of galactic magnetic fields.

[4] CHIME is able to detect the mysterious extragalactic fast radio bursts (FRBs) that last just milliseconds and have no well established astrophysical explanation.

[1] The instrument is a hybrid semi-cylindrical interferometer designed to measure the large scale neutral hydrogen power spectrum across the redshift range 0.8 to 2.5.

The power spectrum will be used to measure the baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) scale across this redshift range where dark energy becomes a significant contributor to the evolution of the Universe.

This characteristic BAO scale has been well-measured by experiments like Planck and can therefore be used as a 'standard ruler' to determine the size of the Universe as a function of time, thereby indicating the expansion rate.

This design was chosen for CHIME as a cost-effective way of arranging close-packed radio antennas so that the telescope can observe the sky at a wide range of angular scales.

The Teflon-based printed circuit board antennas in the shape of cloverleaf petals[clarification needed] are located along the focal line of each of the wire-mesh half pipe reflectors.

The outputs from the amplifiers travels through coaxial cables at the length of 60 metres (200 ft) to the processors inside shielded containers called F-engines.

[13] It is a smaller-scale version of the full instrument, consisting of two, 36 x 20 metre semi-cylinders populated by 128 dual-polarization antennas, and is currently being used as a testbed for CHIME technology and observing techniques.

Additionally, the Pathfinder will also be capable of making an initial measurement of the baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO) with the intensity mapping technique and will become a useful telescope in its own right.

Construction of CHIME began in 2015 at the Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory (DRAO) near Penticton, British Columbia, Canada.