Digital Backend Implementation: Software vs. Hardware: A Summary
By Reinhard Keller, MPIfR Bonn, Member SOC
The workshop on Digital Backend Implementation: Software vs. Hardware was held on 23 June 2008 at the Max-Planck-Institut für Radioastronomie in Bonn, Germany. This meeting was the seventh in a series of engineering workshops sponsored and organized by the EU Consortium RadioNet within the Sixth Framework Program of the European Commission.
It was a pleasure for the conference summariser to review this day with interesting challenging and brand new developments presented. The workshop gave a broad view of various developments at different institutions related to digital backends.
Many different FPGA boards have been designed and built and a variety of applications is programmed on the chips. Software solutions are providing similar performance with an emphasis to small bandwidth. Niches for each software and hardware implementations can be pointed out, not competing but complementing in application.
I'd like to close by saying what a pleasure it was to participate this very interesting workshop. Not only because of all the new developments in Digital Backends discussed, but also because of the good organisation of the whole day and the comfortable workshop dinner.
On behalf of all of the participants, I'd like to thank all the members of the Local Organising Committee for their great job.