DigiCam: fully digital compact camera for SST-1M telescope

Abstract

The single mirror Small Size Telescopes (SST-1M), being built by a sub-consortium of Polish and Swiss Institutions of the CTA Consortium, will be equipped with a fully digital camera with a compact photodetector plane based on silicon photomultipliers. The internal trigger signal transmission overhead will be kept at low level by introducing a high level of integration. It will be achieved by massively deploying state-of-the-art multi-gigabit transceivers, beginning from the ADC flash converters, through the internal data and trigger signals transmission over backplanes and cables, to the camera's server 10Gb/s Ethernet links. Such approach will allow fitting the size and weight of the camera exactly to the SST-1M needs, still retaining the flexibility of a fully digital design. Such solution has low power consumption, high reliability and long lifetime. The concept of the camera will be described, along with some construction details and performance results.

Large scale characterization and calibration strategy of a SiPM-based camera for gamma-ray astronomy

“…Each SiPM is provided with its operating voltage and a compensation loop on the slow control boards is implemented to cope with breakdown voltage changes with temperature, as described in [13]. To further improve signal uniformity the DigiCam allows to adjust the FADC gain by steps of 0.01% for each readout channel within ±5% (see [10,21] and [14] for more details).…”

DigiCam - Fully Digital Compact Read-out and Trigger Electronics for the SST-1M Telescope proposed for the Cherenkov Telescop

“…The block diagram of the ADC board is shown in Figure 3, and more datailed description may be found in [3]. The layout of ADC board based on ISLA222S25 is shown in Figure 5, left.…”

“…Camera architecture The telescope camera is based on the FlashCam concept [2] and bears the name DigiCam [3]. The design separates the photon detection plane (PDP) from the digital camera electronics (Figure 1).…”