PLATO Compression Library

TL;DR If you don't know what this is, you probably don't want to.

This is the hardware compressor control and software compression library for the PLATO ASW.

Hardware Compressor

The FPGA-based SpaceWire Router and Data Compressor Unit (RDCU) was developed in collaboration with the University of Vienna, Department of Astrophysics (IFA/UVIE) and the Austrian Academy of Sciences Space Research Institute (IWF/OEAW) for the PLATO mission.

The RDCU consists of a GR718RB SpaceWire router and an RTAX2000 FPGA holding the RMAP Target and Data Compressor.

We provide an interface library for configuring the SpaceWire router and controlling the hardware compressor. A demonstrator of this can be found in the examples directory.

Software Compressor

The University of Vienna team provides a set of compression algorithms in the form of a static library to assist the Instrument Control Unit (ICU) in compressing the various PLATO data products.

If you need a CLI for compressing or decompressing data, use the cmp_tool.

Build instructions

We only support a Unix-like build environment. Running make in the root directory will create the static library libcmp.a in the lib directory. In this setup, the library contains the software compression, hardware control and decompression.

Other available options include:

• make test: create and run all unit tests
• make coverage: create an coverage report of all unit tests
• make all: build all tests and examples

For advanced use cases, specialized compilation flags which control binary generation are documented in lib/README.md.