The main objective of the present project is to explore the viability of an
adaptive optics control system based exclusively on Field Programmable Gate
Arrays (FPGAs), making strong use of their parallel processing capability. In
an Adaptive Optics (AO) system, the generation of the Deformable Mirror (DM)
control voltages from the Wavefront Sensor (WFS) measurements is usually
through the multiplication of the wavefront slopes with a predetermined
reconstructor matrix. The ability to access several hundred hard multipliers
and memories concurrently in an FPGA allows performance far beyond that of a
modern CPU or GPU for tasks with a well defined structure such as Adaptive
Optics control. The target of the current project is to generate a signal for a
real time wavefront correction, from the signals coming from a Wavefront
Sensor, wherein the system would be flexible to accommodate all the current
Wavefront Sensing techniques and also the different methods which are used for
wavefront compensation. The system should also accommodate for different data
transmission protocols (like Ethernet, USB, IEEE 1394 etc.) for transmitting
data to and from the FPGA device, thus providing a more flexible platform for
Adaptive Optics control. Preliminary simulation results for the formulation of
the platform, and a design of a fully scalable slope computer is presented.Comment: Paper presented as part of SPIE ICOP 2015 Conference Proceeding