An Open-Source High-Level Graphical Signal Processing Language with Simulation and HDL Generation

TL;DR

This paper introduces Scilab as an open-source alternative frontend for the CASPER FPGA design toolflow, enabling easier high-level design, simulation, and FPGA IP generation for radio astronomy signal processing.

Contribution

The paper presents the implementation of Scilab as a new open-source frontend for CASPER, replacing proprietary MATLAB/Simulink tools, and demonstrates its effectiveness in FPGA-based spectrometer development.

Findings

Scilab successfully used as an alternative frontend for CASPER.

Developed FPGA spectrometer on RFSoC4x2 platform using Scilab.

Supported multiple CASPER-compatible platforms with Scilab.

Abstract

The CASPER (Collaboration for Astronomy Signal Processing and Electronic Research) toolflow is a widely used framework for designing and implementing digital signal processing systems, particularly in the field of radio astronomy. It provides a set of tools and libraries that enable researchers to create custom hardware and software solutions for processing astronomical data. The CASPER toolflow has been instrumental in the development of Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) based digital instruments for various radio telescopes, enabling for 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 a proprietary software. In this paper, we introduce Scilab as a new frontend tool for the CASPER toolflow. Scilab is an open-source software platform for numerical computation and data visualization, which offers a similar environment to MATLAB/Simulink for designing CASPER blocks, generating FPGA Intellectual Property (IP) cores, and simulating Digital Signal Processing (DSP) systems. We present our implementation of Scilab in the CASPER toolflow and demonstrate its capabilities by developing an FPGA based spectrometer on a RFSoC4x2, a commonly used CASPER platform well suited to radio astronomy applications. We have also developed Scilab support for other CASPER compatible platforms. Our results show that Scilab can successfully be used as an alternate frontend for CASPER-based designs.