Generic FPGA Preprocessing for Astrophysics Instruments in HLS

<p>FPGAs are widely deployed on high-energy astroparticle physics instruments to preprocess large volumes of streaming data from various sensors. Increasingly, these deployments are finding their way to space-borne instruments, where constraints on size, weight, and power (SWaP) require careful balancing of speed and resource utilization. Although telescope designs vary widely, they often share common preprocessing elements, including channel-level readout, pedestal subtraction, waveform integration, and zero suppression from front-end ADCs, as well as identification and centroiding of signal islands across groups of multiple channels. High-Level Synthesis (HLS) tools allow these designs to be expressed at a conceptual level, which automates a significant amount of the workload in FPGA design and development; compared to traditional hardware description languages, this enables rapid prototyping and redeployment of common logic across different instruments. Nonetheless, prior work lacks sufficient generality to be applied in a broader context, requiring logic to be rewritten from scratch for a new instrument. In this work, we explore generic programming paradigms in the context of HLS, demonstrating that this allows sufficient flexibility of specification to create a pipeline that can be recompiled to automatically accommodate distinct instruments from a manifest of their unique properties and requirements. We apply this to two diverse instrument designs: scintillator-based detectors with 1D pixel arrays, and imaging atmospheric Cherenkov telescopes with 2D pixel arrays. In doing so, we also present a novel HLS-based two-pass connected-component labeling (CCL) implementation that can be easily switched between 4-way and 8-way CCL.</p>

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Science (MS)

Level thesis:degree_level

Thesis

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Computer Science & Engineering

Year dc:date.available

2025

Author dc:creator

• Song, Qinzhou

Contributors dc:contributor

• Roger Chamberlain, CSE
• Michael Hall, Marion Sudvarg

• FPGA
• High-level Synthesis
• Connected Component Labeling
• Gamma-ray Telescopes Data Preprocessing
• ADAPT
• Real-Time Signal Processing
• Hardware Design
• Computer and Systems Architecture
• Computer Engineering
• Engineering

Language dc:language

English (en)

Identifier

https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/eng_etds/1208

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:openscholarship.wustl.edu:eng_etds-2281