As a part of a design study for the On-Instrument Low Order Wave-front Sensor (OIWFS) for the TMT Infra-Red Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS), we recently evaluated the noise performance of a detector control system consisting of IUCAA SIDECAR DRIVE ELECRONICS CONTROLLER (ISDEC), SIDECAR ASIC and HAWAII-2RG (H2RG) MUX. To understand and improve the performance of this system to serve as a near infrared wavefront sensor, we implemented new read out modes like multiple regions of interest with differential multi-accumulate readout schemes for the HAWAII-2RG (H2RG) detector. In this system, the firmware running in SIDECAR ASIC programs the detector for ROI readout, reads the detector, processes the detector output and writes the digitized data into its internal memory. ISDEC reads the digitized data from ASIC, performs the differential multi-accumulate operations and then sends the processed data to a PC over a USB interface. A special loopback board was designed and used to measure and reduce the noise from SIDECAR ASIC DC biases². We were able to reduce the mean r.m.s read noise of this system down to 1-2 e. for any arbitrary window frame of 4x4 size at frame rates below about 200 Hz.

Date Published: 27 July 2016
PDF: 10 pages
Proc. SPIE 9915, High Energy, Optical, and Infrared Detectors for Astronomy VII, 991520 (27 July 2016); doi: 10.1117/12.2232265

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 9915:
High Energy, Optical, and Infrared Detectors for Astronomy VII
Andrew D. Holland; James Beletic, Editor(s)