MR. AVINASH SURENDRAN

Adaptive Optics (AO) systems on extremely large telescopes of the upcoming era (TMT, E-ELT etc.) will demand high levels of computational requirements and memory bandwidth, both of which are difficult to realize with today's technology. SPARC (Scalable Platform for Adaptive optics Real-time Control) was created as the product of research into the application of parallel processing and high-speed interfacing capabilities offered by FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Arrays) to solve the AO computing problem on large telescopes. The objective of SPARC is primarily to create a future-proof AO platform built on FPGAs, which can scale with the number of wavefront sensor subapertures, pixels per subaperture and is flexible to be interfaced with external memory of different specifications. We have designed an AO platform on an off-the-shelf FPGA development board which satisfies these objectives of scalability. The talk will address the computational bottlenecks in the current AO landscape, give a brief introduction of FPGAs and provide the results of our work with SPARC.