Speaker
Description
The CASPER toolflow is a widely used framework for designing and implementing digital signal processing (DSP) systems, particularly in the field of radio astronomy. It provides a set of tools and libraries that enables researchers to create custom hardware and software solutions for processing astronomical data. The CASPER toolflow has been instrumental in the development of various radio telescopes and instruments, enabling real-time data processing and analysis. However, the current frontend tool that CASPER uses for high-level FPGA design is based on Model Composer integrated into MATLAB/Simulink, which is proprietary software. In this talk, I introduce Scilab, an open-source software platform for numerical computation and data visualization, as a new frontend tool for the CASPER toolflow. Scilab offers a similar environment to MATLAB/Simulink for designing CASPER blocks, generating FPGA IP cores, and simulating DSP systems. I will present on integrating Scilab into the CASPER toolflow and demonstrate its capabilities by creating an FPGA based spectrometer. Our results show that Scilab can successfully be used as an alternate frontend for CASPER-based designs.