When companies are working on revolutionary designs, they need to work with companies that are able to think outside the box.

One such application was for a segmented mirror telescope which would be used for space applications. This telescope would use adaptive optics. As opposed to traditional telescope mirrors which take years to polish and which cannot correct for the earth’s atmosphere - thereby diminishing the telescopes optical performance, using adaptive optics means that the mirrors do not require polishing, and the actuators correct for poor mirror optics and atmospheric disturbances. The challenge lies in the number of actuators needed to control the mirror – 189 actuators per petal, times 6 petals totaling over 1,000 actuators – each needing to receive commands 200 times per second. This setup also requires phase sensors which use sub apertures – 61 sub apertures x 6 petals x 1024 pixels, with the camera transmitting 1024 x 1280 8-bit pixels at 500 fps. The algorithms needed to process this data – 2D FFTs, cross correlations, and large matrixes – are very computationally intensive. The large data sets also required high bandwidth I/O.

The final hybrid processing solution provided by BittWare included:

• Multiple 6U-cPCI boards totaling 24 DSPs [4 DSPs (1 cluster) per petal]
• 6 Serdes channels, each running at 250 Mbytes/s
• 3rd Party LVDS cameral link board and high-density DSPs

In addition, BittWare developed and supplied the routing logic for the camera link board, and improved the Serdes data bandwidth to keep up with the camera output. BittWare's ATLANTiS FrameWork provided all data routing on each individual board and between boards. The result was a custom solution that efficiently and effectively solved the challenge at hand.