The PAUCam is an optical camera with an array of 18 CCDs (Hamamatsu Photonics K.K.) and up to 45 narrow and broad band filters. The camera will be installed on the William Herschel Telescope (WHT) in the Canary Islands, Spain. In order to fulfill with the specifications for the camera readout system, it was necessary to test the different readout electronics subsystems individually before to integrate the final readout work package, which is composed of 4 MONSOON (NOAO) front-ends, 6 fan out boards (MIX), each one driving up to 5 CCDs signals and a pre-amplification stage (PREAMP) located inside the cryostat. To get the subsystems integration, it was built a small camera prototype using the same technology as used in the main camera: a carbon fiber cryostat refrigerated by a cryotiger cooling system but with capacity to allocate just 2 CCDs, which were readout and re-characterized to measure the electronics performance as conversion factor or gain, readout noise, stability, linearity, etc. while the cross-talk was measured by using a spot-light. The aim of this paper is to review the whole process of assembly, integration and test (AIT) of the readout electronics work package and present the main results to demonstrate the viability of the proposed systems to be use with the PAUCam camera.

Date Published: 28 July 2014
PDF: 10 pages
Proc. SPIE 9147, Ground-based and Airborne Instrumentation for Astronomy V, 91474Q (28 July 2014); doi: 10.1117/12.2054894

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 9147:
Ground-based and Airborne Instrumentation for Astronomy V
Suzanne K. Ramsay; Ian S. McLean; Hideki Takami, Editor(s)