# Introduction to the Special Issue on Digital Signal Processing in Radio Astronomy

## TL;DR

This paper reviews recent advances in digital signal processing for radio astronomy, highlighting the shift towards using off-the-shelf hardware like GPUs and FPGAs, and discusses future trends in the field.

## Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of recent DSP developments in radio astronomy, emphasizing hardware trends and future directions.

## Key findings

- Increased use of GPUs and FPGAs over ASICs.
- Adoption of high-speed Ethernet and Infiniband for interconnects.
- Availability of general-purpose FPGA-based DSP systems like CASPER ROACH.

## Abstract

Advances in astronomy are intimately linked to advances in digital signal processing (DSP). This special issue is focused upon advances in DSP within radio astronomy. The trend within that community is to use off-the-shelf digital hardware where possible and leverage advances in high performance computing. In particular, graphics processing units (GPUs) and field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are being used in place of application-specific circuits (ASICs); high-speed Ethernet and Infiniband are being used for interconnect in place of custom backplanes. Further, to lower hurdles in digital engineering, communities have designed and released general-purpose FPGA-based DSP systems, such as the CASPER ROACH board, ASTRON Uniboard and CSIRO Redback board. In this introductory article, we give a brief historical overview, a summary of recent trends, and provide an outlook on future directions.