2008A&A...485..615H

We describe the concept, construction, and testing of TasPGA, a new, versatile digital signal processing device designed for radio astronomy applications. A minimalist design philosophy was used to develop a general-purpose radio astronomy instrument based on field programmable gate array (FPGA) technology. The design emphasises reliability and flexibility, facilitating the rapid development of new FPGA firmware for a wide range of experiments. Hardware and firmware for TasPGA were designed using software provided by Altium Ltd. and Xilinx Inc. We tested the instrument by implementing a Fourier transform spectrometer capable of dividing 100MHz of bandwidth into 16384 channels. We present data taken with a TasPGA spectrometer at the Mt. Pleasant radio observatory, including the spectra of two astronomical methanol masers.