Repurposing ROACH-1 boards for prototyping of readout systems for optical-NIR MKIDs [IMA]

http://arxiv.org/abs/2301.06893


Microwave Kinetic Inductance Detectors (MKIDs) are cryogenic photon detectors and are attractive because they permit simultaneous time, energy and spatial resolution of faint astronomical sources. We present a cost-effective alternative to dedicated (e.g. analogue) electronics for prototyping readout of single-pixel Optical/NIR MKIDs by repurposing existing and well-known ROACH-1 boards. We also present a pipeline that modernises previously-developed software and data frameworks to allow for extensiblity to new applications and portability to new hardware (e.g. Xilinx ZCU111 or 2×2 RFSoC boards).

Read this paper on arXiv…

O. Creaner, C. Bracken, J. Piercy, et. al.
Wed, 18 Jan 23
20/133

Comments: 7 pages, 4 figures, Presented at SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation, 2022, Montr\’eal, Qu\’ebec, Canada