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CCD News (1Jun93)
(from KPNO, NOAO Newsletter No. 34, 1 June 1993)

This is a good opportunity to bring readers of the Newsletter up to date on
our CCD plans, even though there are no specific new capabilities to report.

On the mosaic imager front, we have successfully run our mini-mosaic, a 2 x 2
array of butted Loral 2048 x 2048 CCDs (15 um pixels), several times now on the
0.9-m and once on the 4-m telescope.  Readout time with our version of the new
CTIO ARray CONtroller is 150 seconds. The output image is 4096 x 4096 and
requires 32 Mbytes of storage in integer mode. The chips currently in the
device are thick, but we are awaiting delivery of a number of thinned chips
from Mike Lesser (Steward Obs.). The current schedule has us getting a thinned
mosaic to the telescope for engineering tests in the fall, with a second one,
destined for CTIO, to come on line by the end of the year. Come see what a
one-half degree field of view looks like at our poster at the Berkeley AAS
meeting. We hope to be able to make this imager available to users in spring
1994.

The thinned 3K x 1Ks and 800 x 1200s from our first Loral foundry run are just
now beginning to arrive in significant numbers. One 800 x 1200 has gone into
CryoCam; a new throughput curve for that instrument is shown below. One very
good 800 x 1200 has been sent to CTIO. For that chip we measured a peak QE of
96% at 6000 ¸. We have received three usable 3K x 1Ks also. One of these
will go to CTIO, and one may go to NSO. Our hope is to have three good 3K x 1Ks
in use by the fall; two will be installed in Universal Dewars and will be
available at the 4-m and Coud‚ Feed for spectroscopic applications, and the
other will replace the mediocre quality 3K that we put in GoldCam over a year
ago. Users of GoldCam will be pleased to note that we will reduce the amplitude
of the fringing in the red (at the cost of slightly reduced UV sensitivity).

                         [figure not included]

One other CCD related news item is the arrival of the HARCON controllers. The
Hybrid ARray CONtroller is a modified version of CTIO's transputer-based CCD
controller. It features low power, a high degree of versatility, and high speed
operation. The hardware for ten of these controllers is almost complete, and we
will be installing them at all the KPNO CCD sites during the summer. The
software is lagging a bit behind, and so it may be well into the semester
before the CCDs are actually switched over to the new controllers. With the
versatility of the new systems, we will spend some of our development time
working on features such as higher-speed readout, nondestructive repetitive
reads for lower noise, and anti-blooming microcode. Watch this space for
further details.

Todd Boroson, Rich Reed, Tom Wolfe

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