Performance of the porcelain-metal substrate at microwaves : Alfred Schwarzmann. IEEE Trans. Components, Hybrids Mfg Technol.Chmt-2, (4) 451 (December 1979)

Abstract

The Reticon CP 1001 detector electronics were designed to be used in the Halley multicolor camera (HMC). The Reticon sensor operates in two different modes during the mission. First, it is used during the acquisition phase at the beginning of the camera activities at 23 μsec per pixel low-noise readout rate. Later on in the mission, a fast trigger signal is derived from the Reticon electronics to activate the charge-coupled device (CCD) imager at the correct time during the spin period to get the correct part of the comet's image; here the readout rate is 0.5 μsec per pixel. The readout electronics are switched from the very sensitive low-noise mode with a long light integration time to the very fast but less sensitive mode with a short integration time. Because weight and power are limited on the spacecraft and the environment is generally noisy, only one preamplifier per video line is used for both slow and fast readout. It is situated in the immediate vicinity of the detector and its bandwidth is switchable by remote control. To reduce the circuit complexity, correlated double sampling is implemented using a unique circuit requiring only one additional amplifier per video channel. It obtained 1300 electrons rms noise in the slow readout mode and about 1000 electrons rms in the fast mode.