Adaptive Optics Real-Time Control Using FPGA

Adaptive optics is a very promising field in earth-based astronomy, and has become a must in the development of large (10 m) and giant (50-100 m) telescopes. Real time compensation of the atmospheric turbulence requires a huge amount of processing power that goes beyond the practical limits of today´s processor capability, and perhaps tomorrow´s. FPGAs may become a viable approach when exploiting their natural parallel arrangement and their continuously improving speed, after their size has grown up to the point of accepting a whole system to be embedded in just one unit. In order to evaluate the feasibility of such a system, a laboratory adaptive optical test bench has been developed, needing only one VTRTEX-4 FPGA to implement the whole closed loop processing chain, computing 39 actuations from a 8times8 microlenses array at 1000 images per second.