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

Abstract

The SST-1M is one of three prototype small-sized telescope designs proposed for the Cherenkov Telescope Array, and is built by a consortium of Polish and Swiss institutions. The SST-1M will operate with DigiCaman innovative, compact camera with fully digital read-out and trigger electronics. A high level of integration will be achieved by massively deploying state-of-the-art multi-gigabit transmission channels, beginning from the ADC flash converters, through the internal data and trigger signals transmission over backplanes and cables, to the camera's server link. Such an approach makes it possible to design the camera to fit the size and weight requirements of the SST-1M exactly, and provide low power consumption, high reliability and long lifetime. The structure of the digital electronics will be presented, along with main physical building blocks and the internal architecture of FPGA functional subsystems.

Optimized framegrabber for the Cherenkov telescope array

“…The 10G technology has been required to transmit the high amount of data generate at the CTA telescope, as described in other contributions. 23,24 3 XDACQ Data Aggregation/Switching System In this section, the data aggregation and routing system requirements are presented and the proposed solution is described explaining its different components.…”

The small size telescope projects for the Cherenkov Telescope Array

“…The slow control board, part of the photosensor plane, ensures a self-calibrating camera with a feedback system which tunes the bias voltage according to temperature changes. The DigiCam (based on the FlashCam approach) full digitizing readout system of the camera guarantees deadtime-less data acquisition (DAQ), high throughput and high flexibility in trigger selections [7].…”

The front-end electronics and slow control of large area SiPM for the SST-1M camera developed for the CTA experiment

“…3) is the most striking difference from conventional sensors, the large size and thus large detected light intensity [pe] Charge resolution for a single pixel sensor at different night sky background levels measured on a fully assembled module using the digital readout electronics (DigiCam [10]). The full red line represents the CTA requirement, the dashed black line the goal to reach and the dot-dashed blue line the Poisson limit.…”