Manuel Kraus Erlangen

Compact High Energy Camera concept for CTA(pdf)

The future ground-based gamma-ray experiment Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) will feature multiple types of imaging atmospheric Cherenkov telescopes, each with thousands of pixels. To be affordable, camera concepts for these telescope have to feature low cost per channel, on the other hand the requirements given by the CTA collaboration have to be met in order to reach the scientific goals. We present the Compact High Energy Camera (CHEC) concept for CTA and introduce the application-specific integrated circuit TARGET (TeV Array Readout Electronics with GSa/s sampling and Event Trigger). One of these chips provides 16 parallel input channels, a 4096 sample buffer for each channel, full waveform information in a tight readout window and adjustable sampling rate. We show preliminary results of the characterization and testing of this readout electronics performed at the Centre for Astroparticle Physics in Erlangen.