Dan Werthimer
Center for Astronomy Signal Processing and Electronics Research (CASPER) University of California, Berkeley danw@ssl.berkeley.edu
Talk
Open Source Hardware and Gateware for Radio Astronomy Backends
We describe collaborative techniques for rapid development of high performance radio telescope digital instrumentation.
Traditional instrumentation for telescope arrays has been built from specialized custom chips, many different boards and racks, using custom cabling and protocols. Such instruments take years to design and debug; they are inflexible, expensive, require experts to maintain, and are usually out out of date before they are working well.
We present some of the new architectures and tools that make it relatively easy to develop a variety of scalable real time signal processing instrumentation. We utilize commercial 10 Gbit ethernet switches (to solve the large-N correlator and beamformer interconnect problem), together with general purpose open source FPGA hardware and software modules. This general purpose FPGA computing hardware can be purchased at the last minute, and upgraded as the array grows, similar to purchasing and growing a computer cluster. We and our collaborators have used these techniques to rapidly develop and deploy a variety of correlators, beamformers, spectrometers, and pulsar, transient and VLBI instrumentation.
Open source hardware, software, libraries, tools, and reference designs are currently utilized by 30 observatories and universities, available at http://casper.berkeley.edu
Poster
CASPER - Center for Astronomy Signal Processing and Electronics Research