A SiPM photon-counting readout system for Ultra-Fast Astronomy

TL;DR

This paper presents a custom SiPM-based readout system designed for ultra-fast optical transient detection in astronomy, capable of high-speed, low-power, multi-channel photon counting for millisecond to nanosecond phenomena.

Contribution

We developed a novel, multi-channel SiPM readout system with high temporal resolution and low power consumption for ultra-fast astronomical transient detection.

Findings

Successfully achieved 16 ns time-tagging of photon data

Enabled concurrent 16-channel data acquisition

Operated with a maximum power of 300 mW per channel

Abstract

Very little work has been done searching for astrophysical transient optical emission in the millisecond to nanosecond regime with significant sensitivity. We call this regime "Ultra-Fast Astronomy", or UFA. To investigate transients on as short time scales as possible, we developed our own customized readout system for a silicon photomultiplier (SiPM)-based UFA camera, intended for use on conventional astronomical telescopes. SiPMs, available in array packages for imaging a field, are capable of time-tagged single-photon detection in the visible wavelength range. Our readout system consists of 16 channels of 14-bit data logging. Each channel includes a 50-dB gain pre-amplifier, signal shaping circuits, an analogue front end, an analogue to digital converter, and a Xilinx UltraScale+ Field Programable Gate Array Multipurpose System on Chip (FPGA-MPSoC)board for data-logging. We show that our system successfully read out the data from SiPM at 16 ns intervals with a maximum power consumption of 300 mW per channel and capability to perform concurrent 16 channels readout.