Design and evaluation of a high-performance charge coupled device camera for astronomical imaging

Abstract

The Space Solar Telescope (SST) is the first Chinese space astronomy mission. This paper introduces the design of a high-performance 2K × 2K charge coupled device (CCD) camera that is an important payload in the Space Solar Telescope. The camera is composed of an analogue system and a digital embedded system. The analogue system is first discussed in detail, including the power and bias voltage supply circuit, power protection unit, CCD clock driver circuit, 16 bit A/D converter and low-noise amplifier circuit. The digital embedded system integrated with an NIOS II soft-core processor serves as the control and data acquisition system of the camera. In addition, research on evaluation methods for CCDs was carried out to evaluate the performance of the TH7899 CCD camera in relation to the requirements of the SST project. We present the evaluation results, including readout noise, linearity, quantum efficiency, dark current, full-well capacity, charge transfer efficiency and gain. The results show that this high-performance CCD camera can satisfy the specifications of the SST project.