Digicom Releases White Paper on Astronomy and Aerospace Innovation and Collaboration

Digicom Electronics and CASPER’S Technology Open Endless Possibilities for Astronomy and Aerospace Innovation and Collaboration

by Andrea Roberts

The Collaboration for Astronomy Signal Processing and Electronics Research (CASPER) has been working for a decade to reduce the time and cost of designing, building, and deploying new digital radio-astronomy instruments. Today, CASPER technology powers over 45 scientific instruments worldwide. A significant contribution to these innovations comes from Digicom Electronics, an electronics manufacturing services (EMS) company that has been manufacturing in the California Bay area since 1982. Digicom, along with a team of researchers, engineers, and scientists, developed a Reconfigurable Open Architecture Computing Hardware (ROACH) system that forms the foundation upon which all these products are built.

This paper describes the history of this system, the collaboration with major universities, research institutes, government organizations, the scientific community, and industry, and details some of the break-through innovations and initiatives that were spawned as a result.

Download complete paper here.