Goals

The primary goal of CASPER is to streamline and simplify the design flow of radio astronomy instrumentation by promoting design reuse through the development of platform-independent, open-source hardware and software.

Our aim is to couple the real-time streaming performance of application-specific hardware with the design simplicity of general-purpose software. By providing parameterized, platform-independent "gateware" libraries that run on reconfigurable, modular hardware building blocks, we abstract away low-level implementation details and allow astronomers to rapidly design and deploy new instruments.

Future Plans

CASPER is currently focusing on porting our existing libraries and designs to the newest version of our toolflow for eventual use with our newest processing board, the Reconfigurable Open Architecture Computing Hardware (ROACH) board.

At the same time, we are building demo instruments, both to validate our library blocks and to provide reference designs for end users. Most notably, we continue to improve our packetized correlator design.

We plan to offer training courses in the use of our toolflow to interested scientists and engineers.

Mailing List

If you are a CASPER collaborator, or you're just interested in what we're up to, feel free to join our mailing list:
To subscribe, go to http://lists.berkeley.edu.