The CRAFT Coherent upgrade
CRACO is the latest hardware upgrade to our ASKAP radio telescope developed for the CRAFT (Commensal Realtime ASKAP Fast Transient) survey, and now available as a National Facility instrument, on a shared-risk basis. CRACO records millisecond-time resolution visibility data, and searches for dispersed fast transient signals including fast radio bursts (FRB), pulsars, and ultra-long period objects (ULPO).
CRACO represents a quantum leap forward in ASKAP’s ability to detect rapid transients. Its 20 FPGA-based Alveo accelerator cards examine 20 trillion pixels per second – the equivalent of 1 million people watching Youtube – in a box the size of a fridge.
Transients detected in real time by CRACO trigger the capture of raw voltage data from the ASKAP beamformer, which is then used to localise it (fix its position on the sky) to arcsecond precision.
Details of the CRACO design and performance can be found in the publication here describing the first survey made using it. The following summary is taken from the document “How CRACO works” by Keith Bannister.
Read more about CRACO in our news.
CRACO Aims
- Antenna-coherent FRB search – 5x improvement in detection sensitivity
- Similar time/frequency resolution to existing ICS system: ~1ms/1MHz
- 0.5-2 FRBs / day each with ~arcsecond localisation
- Re-use existing voltage dump infrastructure
- Just build an awesome detection machine


Brief History
- Talked about CRACO at ASA 2018
- Preliminary study / review thingy July 2019
- Started benchmarking technologies Dec 2019
- Committed to FPGAs in COVID madness March 2020. J-P: “High risk, high return”
- Pilot cluster order placed April 2020
- Pilot cluster commissioned ~April 2021
- Working processing pipeline – Aug 2021
- Hardware fully commissioned on site – Nov 2023
- Paper describing first survey submitted – Oct 2024
- PASA paper published – Jan 2025


CRAFT/CRACO overall schematic

(from Wang et al., 2025).