For low-temperature experiments such as liquid xenon dark matter detectors, it is crucial to read out detector signals from cryostats. Traditionally, photoelectrical signals are transmitted from the cryogenic region to the outside using coaxial cables through vacuum feedthroughs on the cryostats. In this paper, we investigate an analog optical transmission method in which the raw electrical signals are converted into optical signals with light intensity linearly proportional to the electrical amplitude, transmitted out of the cryogenic environment through optical fiber, and subsequently converted back into electrical signals by photoelectric devices while preserving the signal waveform. This new approach offers advantages, including low attenuation over long-distance transmission and reduced crosstalk across the feedthroughs. Additionally, the low-temperature optical wavelength multiplexing scheme has been investigated and applied, increasing the transmission capability of a single fiber. At -100 degree Celsius, the proposed analog optical readout system achieves a -3dB bandwidth of larger than 150MHz, a dynamic range of up to 500mV, and a low cryogenic-region power consumption of 70mW per channel, demonstrating its strong potential for low-temperature experiments.
Three generations of full-custom analog integrated circuits designed for low-power, high-speed sampling of Radio-Frequency (RF) transients in excess of the Nyquist minimum have been developed. These 0.25$μm$ CMOS devices are denoted the Large Analog Bandwidth Recorder and Digitizer with Ordered Readout (LABRADOR) ASICs and finally consist of 9 channels of 260 deep sampling. Continuous sampling is provided with common stop capability. Input analog bandwidth is approximately 1GHz and sampling speeds are adjustable from 0.02 to 3.7GSa/s. Completely parallel internal conversion supports 12-bit dig…
A set of analog electronics boards for serial readout of silicon strip sensors was fabricated. A commercially available amplifier is mounted on a homemade hybrid board in order to receive analog signals from silicon strip sensors. Also, another homemade circuit board is fabricated in order to translate amplifier control signals into a suitable format and to provide bias voltage to the amplifier as well as to the silicon sensors. We discuss technical details of the fabrication process and performance of the circuit boards we developed.
The readout chip for the CMS pixel detector has to deal with an enormous data rate. On-chip zero suppression is inevitable and hit data must be buffered locally during the latency of the first level trigger. Dead-time must be kept at a minimum. It is dominated by contributions coming from the readout. To keep it low an analog readout scheme has been adopted where pixel addresses are analog coded. We present the architecture of the final CMS pixel detector readout chip with special emphasis on the analog readout chain. Measurements of its performance are discussed.
The potential application of advanced digital communication schemes in a future upgrade of the CMS Tracker readout optical links is currently being investigated at CERN. We show experimentally that multi-Gbit/s data rates are possible over the current 40 MSamples/s analog optical links by employing techniques similar to those used in ADSL. The concept involves using one or more digitally-modulated sinusoidal carriers in order to make efficient use of the available bandwidth.
Charge Coupled Devices (CCDs) have been successfully used in several high energy physics experiments over the past two decades. Their high spatial resolution and thin sensitive layers make them an excellent tool for studying short-lived particles. The Linear Collider Flavour Identification (LCFI) collaboration is developing Column-Parallel CCDs (CPCCDs) for the vertex detector of a future Linear Collider. The CPCCDs can be read out many times faster than standard CCDs, significantly increasing their operating speed. A test stand for measuring the charge transfer inefficiency (CTI) of a prototy…
Charge Coupled Devices (CCDs) have been successfully used in several high energy physics experiments over the past two decades. Their high spatial resolution and thin sensitive layers make them an excellent tool for studying short-lived particles. The Linear Collider Flavour Identification (LCFI) collaboration is developing Column-Parallel CCDs (CPCCDs) for the vertex detector of the International Linear Collider (ILC). The CPCCDs can be read out many times faster than standard CCDs, significantly increasing their operating speed. The results of detailed simulations of the charge transfer inef…
Development of Readout Electronics for a High-Speed Event-Driven Neutron Imaging Detector Based on Timepix4
Institute of High Energy Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences(中国科学院高能物理研究所);Spallation Neutron Source Science Center(散裂中子源科学中心);University of Chinese Academy of Sciences(中国科学院大学);University of Electronic Science and Technology of China(电子科技大学)
With the increasing physical event rate and number of electronic channels, traditional readout scheme meets the challenge of improving readout speed caused by the limited bandwidth of crate backplane. In this paper, a high-speed data readout method based on Ethernet is designed for each module to have capability of transmitting data to DAQ. Features of explicitly parallel data transmitting and distributed network architecture make the readout system has advantage of adapting varying requirements of particle physics experiments. Furthermore, to guarantee the readout performance and flexibility,…
Charge Coupled Devices (CCDs) have been successfully used in several high energy physics experiments over the past two decades. Their high spatial resolution and thin sensitive layers make them an excellent tool for studying short-lived particles. The Linear Collider Flavour Identification (LCFI) collaboration is developing Column-Parallel CCDs (CPCCDs) for the vertex detector of a future Linear Collider. The CPCCDs can be read out many times faster than standard CCDs, significantly increasing their operating speed. An Analytic Model has been developed for the determination of the charge trans…
The same charge sensitive preamplifier and discriminator circuit with different isolation strategies has been tested to compare the isolation of both analog and digital circuits from the substrate of a 65nm bulk CMOS process to the isolation of only digital circuits, tying analog ground locally to the substrate. This study will show that the circuit with analog on the substrate and digital in deep N-well has better noise isolation between analog and digital.
Charge Coupled Devices (CCDs) have been successfully used in several high energy physics experiments over the past two decades. Their high spatial resolution and thin sensitive layers make them an excellent tool for studying short-lived particles. The Linear Collider Flavour Identification (LCFI) Collaboration has been developing Column-Parallel CCDs for the vertex detector of a future Linear Collider which can be read out many times faster than standard CCDs. The most recent studies are of devices designed to reduce both the CCD's intergate capacitance and the clock voltages necessary to driv…
In the context of the Silicon tracking for a Linear Collider (SiLC) R&D collaboration, a highly compact mixed-signal chip has been designed in 130nm CMOS technology intended to read Silicon strip detectors for the experiments at the future International Linear Collider. The chip includes eighty eight channels of a full analog signal processing chain and analog to digital conversion with the corresponding digital controls and readout channels. The chip is 5x10mm2 where the analog implementation represents 4/5 of the total Silicon area.
We evaluate the performances of a 100 um-thick silicon strip detector (SSD) with a 300 MeV proton beam and a 90Sr beta-ray source. Signals from the SSD have been read out using a VLSI chip. Common-mode noise, signal separation efficiency and energy resolution are compared with those for the SSD's with a thickness of 300 um and 500 um. Energy resolution for minimum ionizing particles (MIP's) is improved by fitting the non-constant component in a common-mode noise with a linear function.
With Skipper-CCD detectors it is possible to take multiple samples of the charge packet collected on each pixel. After averaging the samples, the noise can be extremely reduced allowing the exact counting of electrons per pixel. In this work we present an analog circuit that, with a minimum number of components, applies a double slope integration (DSI), and at the same time, it averages the multiple samples producing at its output the pixel value with sub-electron noise. For this prupose, we introduce the technique of using the DSI integrator capacitor to add the skipper samples. An experiment…
TIGER (Turin Integrated Gem Electronics for Readout) is a mixed-mode front-end ASIC developed to readout the new inner tracking detector of the BESIII experiment, carried out at BEPCII in Beijing. The detector is planned to be installed during the 2018 upgrade and features an innovative three-layer triple-CGEM (Cylindrical Gas Electron Multiplier) with analog readout. The ASIC comprises 64 channels, each of which features a dual-branch architecture to extract and digitize the timestamp and charge of the input signal. The time-of-arrival is provided by a set of low-power TDCs, based on analog i…
A prototype detector for Compton camera imaging is under development. A monolithic array of 19 channel Silicon drift detector with on-chip electronics is going to be used as a scatter detector for the prototype system. Custom designed analog and digital readout electronics for this detector was first tested by using a single cell Silicon drift detector. This paper describes the readout architecture and presents the results of the measurement.
Precision phase readout of optical beat note signals is one of the core techniques required for intersatellite laser interferometry. Future space based gravitational wave detectors like eLISA require such a readout over a wide range of MHz frequencies, due to orbit induced Doppler shifts, with a precision in the order of $μ\textrm{rad}/\sqrt{\textrm{Hz}}$ at frequencies between $0.1\,\textrm{mHz}$ and $1\,\textrm{Hz}$. In this paper, we present phase readout systems, so-called phasemeters, that are able to achieve such precisions and we discuss various means that have been employed to reduce n…
Scaling of multi-pixel cryogenic detectors for imaging becomes increasingly difficult with size due to complexity of readout circuitry and cryogenic constraints (thermal load from wiring). We propose and demonstrate a new readout scheme based on a highly stable RF oscillator composed of a superconducting tunnel junction which exhibits relaxation oscillations. The oscillation frequency is almost linear with the analog bias signal over a wide operation range. The frequency signals from different detectors can be combined into one single readout line. The current noise of an optimized circuit is …
Current, state-of-the-art CCDs are close to being able to deliver all key performance figures for future strategic X-ray missions except for the required frame rates. Our Stanford group is seeking to close this technology gap through a multi-pronged approach of microelectronics, signal processing and novel detector devices, developed in collaboration with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and MIT Lincoln Laboratory (MIT-LL). Here we report results from our (integrated) readout electronics development, digital signal processing and novel SiSeRO (Single electron Sensitive Read Out)…
We report a demonstration of the scalability of optically transparent xenon in the solid phase for use as a particle detector above a kilogram scale. We employ a liquid nitrogen cooled cryostat combined with a xenon purification and chiller system to measure the scintillation light output and electron drift speed from both the solid and liquid phases of xenon. Scintillation light output from sealed radioactive sources is measured by a set of high quantum efficiency photomultiplier tubes suitable for cryogenic applications. We observed a reduced amount of photons in solid phase compared to that…
Belle II is a new-generation B-factory experiment, dedicated to exploring new physics beyond the standard model of elementary particles in the flavor sector. Belle~II started data-taking in April 2018, using a synchronous data acquisition (DAQ) system based on pipelined trigger flow control. The Belle II DAQ system is designed to handle a 30-kHz trigger rate with approximately 1% of dead time, under the assumption of a raw event size of 1 MB. The DAQ system is reliable, and the overall data-taking efficiency reached 84.2% during the run period of January 2020 to June 2020. The current readout …
This work presents the design and preliminary performance of a highly-multiplexed superconducting detector readout. The readout system is implemented on the Xilinx ZCU111 RFSoC Evaluation Board. The current design uses 12% of the DSPs, 60% of the LUTs, 20% of the FFs, and 30% of the BRAM and makes timing at 512 MHz. The system uses two integrated ADCs and DACs running at 4.096 GSPS to read out 2,048 superconducting detectors. This work targets a 2x increase in the number of superconducting detectors processed per board with 80% less power than previous readout schemes. The open-source design l…
An instrumentation prototype for acquiring high-speed transient data from an array of high bandwidth antennas is presented. Multi-kilometer cable runs complicate acquisition of such large bandwidth radio signals from an extensive antenna array. Solutions using analog fiber optic links are being explored, though are very expensive. We propose an inexpensive solution that allows for individual operation of each antenna element, operating at potentially high local self-trigger rates. Digitized data packets are transmitted to the surface via commercially available Giga-bit Ethernet hardware. Event…
The RD50-CMOS group aims to design and study High Voltage CMOS (HVCMOS) chips for use in a high radiation environment. Currently, measurements are performed on RD50-MPW2 chip, the second prototype developed by this group. The active matrix of the prototype consists of 8x8 pixels with analog front end. Details of the analog front end and simulations have been already published earlier. This contribution focuses on the Caribou based readout system of the active matrix. Each pixel of the active matrix can be readout one after the other. Relevant aspects of hardware, firmware and software are intr…
Superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors are set apart from other photon counting technologies above all else by their extremely high speed, with few-ten-ps timing resolution, and recovery times $τ_R\lesssim$10 ns after a detection event. In this work, however, we identify in the conventional electrical readout scheme a nonlinear interaction between the detector and its readout which can make stable, high-efficiency operation impossible at count rates even an order-of-magnitude less than $τ_R^{-1}$. We present detailed experimental confirmation of this, and a theoretical model which qu…
A radiation-hard quad-channel 12-bit 40 MSPS pipeline analog-to-digital converter (ADC) has been designed for the trigger readout electronics Phase-I upgrade of the ATLAS Liquid Argon calorimeter, at the CERN Large Hadron Collider. The final version of the custom design, fabricated in a commercial 130 nm CMOS process, is presented and found to meet the system requirements for analog performance and radiation tolerance. The procedure for quality control of 17200 ADCs is described and the results are presented.
We designed a versatile analog front-end chip, called LTARS, for TPC-applications, primarily targeted at dual-phase liquid Ar-TPCs for neutrino experiments and negative-ion $μ$-TPCs for directional dark matter searches. Low-noise performance and wide dynamic range are two requirements for reading out the signals induced on the TPC readout channels. One of the development objectives is to establish the analog processing circuits under low temperature operation, which are designed on function block basis as reusable IPs (Intellectual Properties). The newly developed ASIC was implemented in the S…
We develop the vertex detector for the international linear collider (ILC) using the FPCCD (Fine Pixel CCD), whose pixel size is 5 x 5 um2. Together with the FPCCD sensor, a prototype of the readout ASIC was developed in 2008. The readout ASIC was confirmed to work correctly at slow readout speed (1.5 Mpix/sec). In this letter, we describe the status of the performance study for the readout ASIC.
This paper describes a FADC Readout system developed for the tap water $α/β$ dose monitoring system which is based on EJ444 phoswich scintillation detector and wavelength shifting fiber readout. The Readout system contains dual sampling channels that can supply sampling rate up to 1 GSPS, 14-Bit vertical resolution and adequate effective number of bits (9.7 Bits at 10 MHz), which is optimum for the discrimination of the minimal difference between alpha/beta signals. Moreover, the system is based on a ZYNQ SoC which provides high data throughput speed, low latency and excellent flexibility. As …
Superconducting microresonators have been successfully utilized as detection elements for a wide variety of applications. With multiplexing factors exceeding 1,000 detectors per transmission line, they are the most scalable low-temperature detector technology demonstrated to date. For high-throughput applications, fewer detectors can be coupled to a single wire but utilize a larger per-detector bandwidth. For all existing designs, fluctuations in fabrication tolerances result in a non-uniform shift in resonance frequency and sensitivity, which ultimately limits the efficiency of band-width uti…
The CDEX (China Dark matter Experiment) is currently in the stage to upgrade to approximately 10 kg HPGe (High Purity Germanium) detectors (CDEX-10) in CJPL (China Jinping Underground Laboratory) and aims to detect the WIMP (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles). Six analog signals and one inhibited signal are outputted from preamplifier by one HPGe detector (~1 kg) of CDEX-10. The analog signals are conditioned with two 6-us and one 12-us shaping amplifiers, and three timing amplifiers respectively. The inhibited signal is used for trigger. The analog signals from shaping and timing amplifier…
Results of detailed simulations of the charge transfer inefficiency of a prototype serial readout CCD chip are reported. The effect of radiation damage on the chip operating in a particle detector at high frequency at a future accelerator is studied, specifically the creation of two electron trap levels, 0.17 eV and 0.44 eV below the bottom of the conduction band. Good agreement is found between simulations using the ISE-TCAD DESSIS program and an analytical model for the former level but not for the latter. Optimum operation is predicted to be at about 250 K where the effects of the traps is …
High precision and large dynamic range measurement are required in the readout systems for the Water Cherenkov Detector Array (WCDA) in Large High Altitude Air Shower Observatory (LHAASO). This paper presents a prototype of 12-bit 40 MSPS Analog-to-Digital Converter (ADC) Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) designed for the readout of LHAASO WCDA. Combining this ADC and the front-end ASIC finished in our previous work, high precision charge measurement can be achieved based on the digital peak detection method. This ADC is implemented based on power-efficient Successive Approximatio…
Plans to upgrade the LHC after approximately 10 years of operation are currently being considered at CERN. A tenfold increase in luminosity delivered to the experiments is envisaged in the so-called Super LHC (SLHC). This will undoubtedly give rise to significantly larger data volumes from the detectors, requiring faster data readout. The possibility of upgrading the CMS Tracker analog readout optical links using a bandwidth efficient digital modulation scheme for deployment in the SLHC has been extensively explored at CERN. Previous theoretical and experimental studies determined the achievab…
The Compressed Baryonic Matter (CBM) experiment will investigate the quantum chromodynamics (QCD) phase diagram at high net baryon densities and moderate temperatures. CBM Time of Flight (TOF) system is composed of super modules containing high performance Multi-gap Resistive Plate Chambers (MRPCs). During the mass production, each super module assembled with MRPCs needs quality evaluation, which includes time measurement and data readout. Read out electronics encounter the challenge of reading data from a super module at a speed of about 6 Gbps. In this paper, a read out method based on Perip…
Using simulations and analytical approaches, we have studied single hit resolutions obtained with a binary readout, which is often proposed for high granularity detectors to reduce the generated data volume. Our simulations considering several parameters (e.g. strip pitch) show that the detector geometry and an electronics parameter of the binary readout chips could be optimized for binary readout to offer an equivalent spatial resolution to the one with an analogue readout. To understand the behavior as a function of simulation parameters, we developed analytical models that reproduce simulat…
The challenging conditions of the High-Luminosity LHC require tailored hardware designs for the trigger and data acquisition systems. The Apollo platform features a "Service Module" with a powerful system-on-module computer that provides standard ATCA communications and application-specific "Command Module"s with large FPGAs and high-speed optical fiber links. The CMS version of Apollo will be used for the track finder and the pixel readout. It features up to two large FPGAs and more than 100 optical links with speeds up to 25\,Gb/s. We study carefully the design and performance of the board b…
The CMS pixel detector consists of approximately 66 million silicon pixels whose analog signals are read out by 15,840 programmable Readout Chips. With the recent startup of the LHC, the detector is now collecting data used for precise vertexing and track-finding. In preparation for data taking, the detector's Readout Chips and their supporting readout and control electronics were calibrated. The calibration that has taken place since the detector's installation in the summer of 2008 will be described. These calibrations focused on the optimization of the Readout Chips' thresholds and analog r…
The Large High Altitude Air Shower Observatory (LHAASO) is designed for high energy gamma ray and cosmic ray detection. A Water Cherenkov Detector Array which is sensitive to gamma ray showers above a few hundred GeV is proposed to survey gamma ray sources. The WCDA consists of 3600 PhotoMultiplier Tubes (PMT) which collect the Cherenkov light produced by the shower particles in water. Both high precision time and charge measurement are required over a large dynamic range from 1 photo electron (P.E.) to 4000 P.E. Prototype of an analogue front-end Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC)…
This article presents the readout electronics of a novel beam monitoring system for ion research facility accelerator. The readout electronics are divided into Front-end Card (FEC) and Readout Control Unit (RCU). FEC uses Topmetal II minus to processes the energy of the hitting particles and convert it into a voltage signal. The main function of RCU is to digitize the analog output signal of FEC and format the raw data. On the other hand, the RCU also processes the control commands from the host and distributes the commands according to the mapping. The readout electronic has been characterize…
Single photon avalanche diode (SPAD) arrays have proven themselves as serious candidates for time of flight positron emission tomography (PET). Discrete readout schemes mitigate the low-noise requirements of analog schemes and offer very fine control over threshold levels and timing pickup strategies. A high optical fill factor is paramount to timing performance in such detectors, and consequently space is limited for closely integrated electronics. Nonetheless, a production, daily used PET scanner must minimize bandwidth usage, data volume, data analysis time and power consumption and therefo…
TES-based bolometer and microcalorimeter arrays with thousands of pixels are under development for several space-based and ground-based applications. A linear detector response and low levels of cross talk facilitate the calibration of the instruments. In an effort to improve the properties of TES-based detectors, fixing the TES resistance in a resistance-locked loop (RLL) under optical loading has recently been proposed. Earlier theoretical work on this mode of operation has shown that the detector speed, linearity and dynamic range should improve with respect to voltage biased operation. Thi…
In the Large High Altitude Air Shower Observatory (LHAASO), the Water Cherenkov Detector Array (WCDA) is one of the key parts. The WCDA consists of 3600 Photomultiplier Tubes (PMTs) scattered in a 90000 m2 area, and both high precision time and charge measurements are required over a large dynamic range from 1 to 4000 Photo Electrons (P.E.). To achieve time measurement precision better than 500 ps RMS, high quality clock distribution and automatic phase compensation are needed among the 400 Front End Electronics (FEE) modules. To simplify the readout electronics architecture, clock, data, and …
Depleted monolithic CMOS active pixel sensors (DMAPS) have been developed in order to demonstrate their suitability as pixel detectors in the outer layers of a toroidal LHC apparatus inner tracker (ATLAS ITk) pixel detector in the high-luminosity large hadron collider (HL-LHC). Two prototypes have been fabricated using 150 nm CMOS technology on high resistivity (> 2 k$Ω$ $cm^2$) wafers. The chip size is equivalent to that of the current ATLAS pixel detector readout chip. One of the prototypes is used for detailed characterization of the sensor and the analog readout of the DMAPS. The other is …
An Open Source RFSoC-based Readout Electronics System for Arrays of Kinetic Inductance Detectors and Superconducting Resonators
Arizona State University(亚利桑那州立大学);California Institute of Technology(加州理工学院);NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory(美国国家航空航天局喷气推进实验室);University of Virginia(弗吉尼亚大学);Johns Hopkins University(约翰斯·霍普金斯大学);Custom Design and Instrumentation, LLC(Custom Design and Instrumentation有限责任公司)
The proposed Circular Electron Positron Collider (CEPC) imposes new challenges for the vertex detector in terms of high resolution, low material, fast readout and low power. The Monolithic Active Pixel Sensor (MAPS) technology has been chosen as one of the most promising candidates to satisfy these requirements. A MAPS prototype, called TaichuPix1, based on a data-driven structure, together with a column drain readout architecture, benefiting from the ALPIDE and FE-I3 approaches, has been implemented to achieve fast readout. This paper presents the overall architecture of TaichuPix1, the exper…
We describe a novel high-speed front-end electronic board (FEB) for interfacing an array of 32 Silicon Photo-multipliers (SiPM) with a computer. The FEB provides individually adjustable bias on the SiPMs, and performs low-noise analog signal amplification, conditioning and digitization. It provides event timing information accurate to 1.3 ns RMS. The back-end data interface is realized on the basis of 100 Mbps Ethernet. The design allows daisy-chaining of up to 256 units into one network interface, thus enabling compact and efficient readout schemes for multi-channel scintillating detectors, u…
A Sub-electron-noise Skipper-CCD Readout ASIC with Improved Channel-to-channel Isolation and an Integrated Cryogenic Voltage Reference
Instituto Balseiro(巴尔塞罗研究所);Instituto de Nanociencia y Nanotecnología INN (CNEA-CONICET)(纳米科学与技术研究所(CNEA-CONICET));Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory(费米国家加速器实验室);Universidad Nacional de Córdoba(科尔多瓦国立大学);Comisión Nacional de Energía Atómica (CNEA)(国家原子能委员会);CONICET(阿根廷国家科学研究委员会)
Radiation damage in the plastic scintillator and/or readout WLS fibers in the HE endcap calorimeter 1.4<y<4 in the CMS experiment at LHC and SLHC will require remediation after 2018. We describe one alternative using the existing brass absorber in the Endcap calorimeter, to replace the plastic scintillator tiles with BaF2 tiles, or quartz tiles coated with thin(1-5 micron) films of radiation-hard pTerphenyl(pTP) or the fast phosphor ZnO:Ga. These tiles would be read-out by easily replaceable arrays of straight, parallel WLS fibers coupled to clear plastic-cladded quartz fibers of proven radiat…
In the readout electronics of the Water Cerenkov Detector Array (WCDA) in the Large High Altitude Air Shower Observatory (LHAASO) experiment, both high-resolution charge and time measurement are required over a dynamic range from 1 photoelectron (P.E.) to 4000 P.E. The Analog Front-end (AFE) circuit is one of the crucial parts in the whole readout electronics. We designed and optimized a prototype of the AFE through parameter calculation and circuit simulation, and conducted initial electronics tests on this prototype to evaluate its performance. Test results indicate that the charge resolutio…
This work is proposing and exploring the use of multichannel readout electronics, already used in quality assurance for gain uniformity studies, to measure the uniformity of the induction gap in GEM based detectors. The measurement will furthermore provide a qualification of the readout electrodes in terms of disconnected or shorted channels. The proposed method relies on the dependence on the induction gap capacitance between the readout strips and the bottom of the GEM. The measurement is obtained inducing capacitively a signal on the readout strips pulsing the bottom layer of the GEM foil. …
Microwave Kinetic Inductance Detectors (MKIDs) are cryogenic photon detectors and are attractive because they permit simultaneous time, energy and spatial resolution of faint astronomical sources. We present a cost-effective alternative to dedicated (e.g. analogue) electronics for prototyping readout of single-pixel Optical/NIR MKIDs by repurposing existing and well-known ROACH-1 boards. We also present a pipeline that modernises previously-developed software and data frameworks to allow for extensiblity to new applications and portability to new hardware (e.g. Xilinx ZCU111 or 2x2 RFSoC board…
Microwave Kinetic Inductance Detectors (MKIDs) are the most attractive radiation detectors for far-infrared and sub-mm astronomy: They combine ultimate sensitivity with the possibility to create very large detector arrays, in excess of 10 000 pixels. This is possible by reading-out the arrays using RF frequency division multiplexing, which allows multiplexing ratios in excess of 1000 pixels per readout line. We describe a novel readout system for large arrays of MKIDs, operating in a 2 GHz band in the 4-8 GHz range. The readout, which is a combination of a digital front- and back-end and an an…