Real‐Time Adaptive Optic System Using FPGAs

For “adaptive optics” (AO) that are used in a control loop, sensing of the wavefront is essential for achieving a good performance. One facet in this context is the delay introduced by the wavefront evaluation. This delay should be kept to a minimum. Since the problem can be split into multiple subproblems, field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) may beneficially be employed in view of the FPGAs’ power to compute many tasks in parallel. The evaluation of, e.g., a Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensor (SHWFS) may simply be seen as the evaluation of an image. Therefore, in general, image processing methods may be split into multiple assignments such as connected component labeling (CCL). In this chapter, a new method for real-time evaluation of an SHWFS is introduced. The method is presented in combination with a rapid-control prototyping (RCP) system that is based on real-time Linux operating system