Durham adaptive optics real-time controller

The Durham adaptive optics (AO) real-time controller was initially a proof of concept design for a generic AO control system. It has since been developed into a modern and powerful central-processing-unit-based real-time control system, capable of using hardware acceleration (including field programmable gate arrays and graphical processing units), based primarily around commercial off-the-shelf hardware. It is powerful enough to be used as the real-time controller for all currently planned 8m class telescope AO systems. Here we give details of this controller and the concepts behind it, and report on performance, including latency and jitter, which is less than 10 mu s for small AO systems. (C) 2010 Optical Society of America