Tip-Tilt Mirror Control Based on FPGA for an Adaptive Optics System

This paper describes the development of the tip-tilt mirror control for an adaptive optics system based on the use of FPGA technology instead of using the traditional approach with DSP or microprocessor. The aim of this work is to show that for this kind of application the FPGA technology is not only a viable solution but probably also the best one in some situations, especially when a huge amount of parallel data processing is needed. This will probably be the case of adaptive optics systems for very large telescopes. A brief description of the whole adaptive optics system will be given although the paper will focus especially on the tip-tilt mirror control and its implementation with FPGAs. A new version of the deformable mirror control is also being implemented in FPGAs and will be finished in the near future.