Extending CASPER support to third-party RFSoC boards: A case study with TQ47DR

The open-source CASPER toolflow has become a popular choice for building reconfigurable digital backends in radio astronomy, yet its hardware support has remained limited to a small set of official FPGA boards. Here we extend CASPER compatibility to the third-party TQ47DR RFSoC platform, a high-performance and cost-effective board widely available in China. Our approach integrates multiple layers of adaptation, including the construction of a custom PetaLinux kernel, porting the Karoo Array Telescope Control Protocol (KATCP) server, development of a dedicated clock-management driver, and platform-specific adaptations of the CASPER yellow-block library to enable RFDC (ADC/DAC) and 100 GbE interfaces on TQ47DR, in addition to new yellow blocks and low-level support files created for this platform. Together, these efforts enable the TQ47DR to participate fully in the CASPER design–simulation–compilation–deployment workflow. System-level validation demonstrates excellent ADC performance, deterministic multi-tile synchronization, stable 100 GbE streaming near line rate, and a functional real-time spectrometer. These results confirm that third-party RFSoC boards can be seamlessly integrated into the CASPER ecosystem, broadening its hardware applicability and providing a scalable, reconfigurable, and power-efficient pathway toward next-generation radio astronomy instrumentation.