Microgate is an SME based in Bolzano, Italy. The company operates in two main fields: Timing, Sports, Medical and Engineering, including hardware, firmware and software design, as well as the production of medium quantities. All processes inside the company are monitored by means of certified quality systems (ISO9001 and ISO13485 certifications).
The Engineering department is mainly focused on large projects for astronomy and more specifically on adaptive optics systems for large telescopes. Together with other Italian partners a large contactless mirror technology has been developed over the past 20 years. This technology has been already deployed realizing the adaptive secondary mirror of several large telescopes, including the Multiple Mirror Telescope (MMT – Arizona), the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT – Arizona), the Magellan Telecope (Chile) and the ESO Very Large Telescope (VLT – Chile).
Microgate is currently engaged in the final design and construction of the adaptive mirrors for the next generation of Extremely Large Telescopes (ELTs), in particular the ESO European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT) and the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT). Microgate has developed a very specific know how in developing fully customized solutions based on large clusters of mixed DSP-FPGA boards and, more recently, on FPGAs only. This modular specific hardware has been also employed to perform other fundamental tasks in the adaptive optics loop, like wavefront sensing and real-time wavefront reconstruction. The company’s facilities comprehend also a clean room (ISO 7), used mainly for the integration of the delicate adaptive opitcs instruments.
