SPARTA roadmap and future challenges

SPARTA, the ESO Standard Platform for Adaptive optics Real Time Applications, provides a generic decomposition in functional blocks that can be applied, unchanged, to a variety of different AO systems, ranging from very small single conjugate AO with less than 100 actuators to much bigger and faster systems. For AO systems under development, SPARTA provides an implementation for all those functional blocks that are mapped to currently available technologies. The E-ELT with its instruments poses new challenges in terms of cost and computational complexity. Simply scaling the current SPARTA implementation to the size of E-ELT AO system would be unnecessary expensive and in some cases not even feasible. So, even if the general architecture is still valid, some degree of re-implementation and use of new technologies will be needed. This paper analyses the new general requirements that the E-ELT and its instruments will pose and introduces promising technology and solutions that could replace the current ones and show how the SPARTA architecture could evolve to address those new requirements.