HLS Taking Flight: Toward Using High-Level Synthesis Techniques in a Space-Borne Instrument
Marion Sudvarg, Chenfeng Zhao, Ye Htet, Meagan Konst, Thomas Lang, Nick Song, Roger D. Chamberlain, Jeremy D. Buhler, J. H. Buckley · 2024
FPGAs are widely deployed on high-energy astrophysics telescopes to preprocess and reduce sensor data read out by front-end electronics. Across instruments, these computational pipelines have similar semantics, sharing common stages such as pedestal subtraction, signal integration, zero-suppression, island detection, and centroiding. However, diverse telescope designs require unique implementations of these algorithms, and the logic is often rewritten from scratch for a new instrument.