A New Approach to Radio Astronomy Signal Processing: Packet Switched, FPGA-based, Upgradeable, Modular Hardware and Reusable, Platform-Independent Signal Processing Libraries

Our group seeks to revolutionize the development of radio astronomy signal processing instrumentation by designing and demonstrating a scalable, upgradeable, FPGA-based computing platform and software design methodology that targets a range of real-time radio telescope signal processing applications. This project relies on the development of a small number of modular, connectible, upgradeable hardware components and platform- independent signal processing algorithms and libraries which can be reused and scaled as hardware capabilities expand. We have developed such a hardware platform and many of the necessary signal processing libraries for applications in antenna array correlation, wide-band spectroscopy, and pulsar surveys. We present this platform and two applications we have developed for it as demonstrations of the technology. We also identify future directions for the development of this platform, such as packetization, RFI rejection libraries, and real-time imaging.