ASKAP Redback-3 — An agile digital signal processing platform

The third generation of high end Digital Signal Processing (DSP) platforms for the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) is called Redback-3. It is a purely digital board consisting of three primary components; FPGAs for DSP, DRAM for bulk memory storage and optical communications for inter-board communications. The motivation and strategy for the third generation hardware is significantly different from its predecessors and this is largely reflected in its implementation. It is moving towards a more agile DSP platform for radio astronomy instrumentation and Software Defined Radio (SDR) applications. This paper describes the hardware and firmware in the context of the ASKAP beamformer and correlator subsystems.