Design of a Non-vacuum-cooling Compact Scientific CCD Camera

TL;DR

This paper presents the design and testing of a compact scientific CCD camera with non-vacuum cooling, emphasizing low noise performance and high-speed data acquisition for scientific applications.

Contribution

It introduces a novel non-vacuum-cooling design for scientific CCD cameras, including low noise clock and bias circuits, and demonstrates its effective performance through extensive testing.

Findings

Maximum data rate of 5 million pixels per second

Readout noise as low as 9.29 electrons at 500K pixels/s

Stable operation confirmed through stability tests

Abstract

CCD was born in Bell Laboratories in 1969 and has been widely used in various fields. Its ultra-low noise and high quantum efficiency make it work well in particle physics, high energy physics, nuclear physics and astrophysics. Nowadays, more and more CCD cameras have been developed for medical diagnosis, scientific experiments, aerospace, military exploration and other fields. For the wide range of CCD cameras, a Non-vacuum-cooling compact (NVCC) scientific CCD camera has been developed, including FPGA-based low noise clock and bias driver circuit, data acquisition circuit, STM32-based temperature control design. At the same time, the readout noise of the imaging system is studied emphatically. The scheme to generate the CCD clock and the bias driving circuit through ultralow noise LDOs is proposed. The camera was tested in a variety of environments, and the test results show that the system can run at a maximum rate of 5M pixels/s and readout noise is as low as 9.29e^- when the CCD readout speed is 500K pixels/s. Finally, a series of stability tests were carried out on the camera system.