A project plans to develop two ASICs for CCD controller

Astronomical instrumentation, in many cases, especially the large field of view application while huge mosaic CCD or CMOS camera is needed, requires the camera electronics to be much more compact and of much smaller the size than the controller used to be. Making the major parts of CCD driving circuits into an ASIC or ASICs can greatly bring down the controller's volume, weight and power consumption and make it easier to control the crosstalk brought up by the long length of the cables that connect the CCD output ports and the signal processing electronics, and, therefore, is the most desirable approach to build the large mosaic CCD camera. A project endeavors to make two ASICs, one to achieve CCD signal processing and another to provide the clock drives and bias voltages, is introduced. The first round of design of the two ASICs has been completed and the devices have just been manufactured. Up to now the test of one of the two, the signal processing ASIC, was partially done and the linearity has reached the requirement of the design.