The Square Kilometre Array South Africa (SKA SA) sponsors the 11th Collaboration for Astronomy Signal Processing Electronics Research (CASPER) workshop from Monday, 25 to Friday, 29 January 2016 by the University of Cape Town.

The workshop, which has been held annually since 2006, is an opportunity for participants worldwide to discuss signal processing and related disciplines, touching on new developments and exchanging ideas. Each year the workshop is held in a different location.

The primary goal of CASPER is to streamline and simplify the design flow of radio astronomy instrumentation by promoting design reuse through the development of platform-independent, open-source hardware and software.

“Our aim is to couple the real-time streaming performance of application-specific hardware with the design simplicity of general-purpose software. By providing parameterised, platform-independent ‘gateware’ libraries that run on reconfigurable, modular hardware building blocks, we abstract away low-level implementation details and allow astronomers to rapidly design and deploy new instruments,” says Francois Kapp, digital backend subsystems manager at SKA SA.

The workshop will consist of a cross-pollination of different themes presented over five days and engineers, astronomers, physicists and students will converge to talk about next generation hardware, tools, instruments and research results.

The welcome address will be delivered by Dr Rob Adam, SKA SA Project Director on Monday, 25 January 2016 at 09:00 at the Menzies Building, University of Cape Town.

For more information about the workshop contact Francois Kapp on francois@ska.ac.za or (021) 5067300 or visit the website.