Real time computing

Microgate’s Real Time Reconstructor is a very modular system based on two main components, namely Microgate BCU — Basic Computational Unit, used for real time and diagnostic communication, and Microgate DSP control boardeach capable of ~1 Giga-MACs/s (floating point).

Main characteristics:

  • Up to 15 DSP control boards and 1 BCU can be hosted on a single backplane (15 GMACs/s per backplane) 
  • Several backplanes can be connected to enhance computational power  
  • Real Time interfaceFibre Channel, up to 4.25 Gbit/s (two channels, 2.125 Gbit/s each) 
  • Diagnostic and setup interfaceGigabit Ethernet, copper or fiber available 
  • Dedicated real time communication primitives allow easy and effective implementation of MIMO IIR filters on parallel architecture 
  • Suitable for multi-conjugate adaptive optics 
  • Direct interfacing to Microgate’s Slope Computer. Can be easily interfaced to other control systems 
  • Small size

Current applications:

MMT new multi-conjugate adaptive optics system. The new MMT RTR is realized with a single crate, embedding 1 BCU board and 14 DSP boards. Total computational power amounts to 13.6 GigaMACs (floating point). The system is capable of computing the 336 commands for MMT336 adaptive secondary out from the slopes of 5 Wavefront Sensors with less than 100µs latency.