Using an RTOS to control digital boards in SKA

Abstract

The Square Kilometre Array will be the largest radio telescope ever built. The prototype developed as part of this dissertation can form part of the monitoring and control system of the SKA project. The prototype will run on an ARM Cortex-M4 processor on the Tile Processing Modules (TPMs). The main functions of the prototype software will be to monitor and control the on-board Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), upgrade their firmware and connect the TPM boards to the overall monitoring system. The monitoring and control system is made up of different components including the Telescope Manager (TM), the Monitoring Control and Calibration Servers (MCCS) and the TPMs themselves. These all need to communicate with each other to maintain a heterogeneous ecosystem. A Real-time Operating System (RTOS) running a custom application developed as part of this dissertation runs on the processor. Using an RTOS allows the developed pipeline to be easily ported to different micro-processor architectures with no changes to the pipeline itself. This is achieved through the layers of abstraction provided by the RTOS. The monitoring components in turn communicate with a Complex Programmable Logic Device (CPLD) present on the TPMs through the developed framework. The FPGA registers and memory regions are memory mapped to the CPLD's memory space. This mapping allows the CPLD to control the boards through its firmware. This project also investigates the functional requirements of the RTOS and the developed application. During this dissertation the software architecture that allows the interactions between the processor and the DSP was designed. A working prototype on which evaluation tests were performed was implemented. The platform proved to provide a fast reliable means of interaction over the user datagram protocol (UDP) and all the tests performed resulted in positive results.