A low noise digital readout system for scientific charge coupled devices

SOFO HARO, MIGUEL; SOTO, ANGEL; FERNANDEZ MORONI, GUILLERMO; CHIERCHIE, FERNANDO; STEFANAZZI, LEANDRO; CHAVEZ, RODRIGO; CASTANEDA, ALEJANDRO; HERNANDEZ, KAREN; ZMUDA, TED; WILSER, NEAL; PAOLINI, EDUARDO; OLIVA, ALEJANDRO; CANCELO, GUSTAVO

Mar del Plata

Workshop; 2017 XVII Workshop on Information Processing and Control (RPIC); 2017

Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata

Fully depleted thick CCDs have been designed for infrared astronomy, but their low read-out noise of the order of 2 e- and their considerable mass of 5.2 g, allows novel uses for them in low energy threshold particle detection applications, such as the CONNIE and DAMIC experiments. For both experiments, a reduction of the CCD read-out noise is will produce an increase in the detection efficiency. Few works have demonstrated that is possible reduce the noise applying digital processing techniques, and it is a field that must be explored. In this work the design of a CCD digital acquisition system will be presented. The impact of key parameters as quantization noise, front-end gain and ADC noise will be analyzed. A prototype of the front-end electronics was successfully tested with a CCD exposed to X-rays, achieving 2.3e- of readout noise.