Digital Instrumentation for the Radio Astronomy Community

TL;DR

This paper emphasizes the importance of shared hardware, open-source libraries, and flexible architectures in digital instrumentation to accelerate radio astronomy research and reduce development time.

Contribution

It advocates for technological development supporting interoperability and processing flexibility to benefit the emerging DSP community in radio astronomy.

Findings

Identifies key technological areas for interoperability and flexibility.

Highlights the role of open-source solutions in reducing development time.

Suggests support structures for the DSP community in the next decade.

Abstract

Time-to-science is an important figure of merit for digital instrumentation serving the astronomical community. A digital signal processing (DSP) community is forming that uses shared hardware development, signal processing libraries, and instrument architectures to reduce development time of digital instrumentation and to improve time-to-science for a wide variety of projects. We suggest prioritizing technological development supporting the needs of this nascent DSP community. After outlining several instrument classes that are relying on digital instrumentation development to achieve new science objectives, we identify key areas where technologies pertaining to interoperability and processing flexibility will reduce the time, risk, and cost of developing the digital instrumentation for radio astronomy. These areas represent focus points where support of general-purpose, open-source development for a DSP community should be prioritized in the next decade. Contributors to such technological development may be centers of support for this DSP community, science groups that contribute general-purpose DSP solutions as part of their own instrumentation needs, or engineering groups engaging in research that may be applied to next-generation DSP instrumentation.