Readout Electronics for NIKA

O. Bourrion A. Bideaud A. Benoit A. Cruciani, J.F. Macias-Perez,
A. Monfardini, M. Roesch, L. Swenson and C. Vescovi

CNRS-IN2P3-LPSC Grenoble
e-mail: [email protected]

 Abstract - We developed a prototype of digital frequency-domain multiplexing electronics allowing the real time monitoring of microwave kinetic inductance detector (MKIDs) arrays for mm-wave astronomy. It requires only 2 coaxial cables for instrumenting a large array. For that, an excitation comb of frequencies is generated and fed through the detectors.

The direct frequency synthesis and the data acquisition relie heavily on a large FPGA using parallelized and pipelined processing. The prototype can instrument 128 resonators (pixels) over a bandwidth of 125 MHz. After detailing the technical solution chosen, the algorithm used and the results obtained, the talk briefly presented the upgraded version that is in development.

This presentation was made on October 3, 2011 at the KRYO-2011 Workshop organized by IRAM in Autrans (Vercors) near Grenoble, France; Reference No.STP282, Category 4.