Development of the readout controller for KASINICS

Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute (KASI) is developing the KASI Near Infrared Camera System (KASINICS) which will be installed on the 61 cm telescope at the Sobaeksan Optical Astronomy Observatory (SOAO) in Korea. KASINICS is equipped with a ALADDIN III Quadrant (512×512 InSb array, manufactured by Raytheon). For this instrument, we make a new IR array control electronics system. The controller consists of DSP, Bias, Clock, and Video boards which are installed on a VME bus system. The DSP board includes TMS320C6713, FPGA, and 384MB SDRAM. Clock patterns are downloaded from a PC and stored on the FPGA. USB 2.0 is used for the communication with the PC and UART for the serial communication with peripherals. Each of two video boards has 4 video channels. The Bias board provides 16 voltage sources and the Clock board has 15 clock channels. Our goal of readout speed is 10 frames sec^-1. We have successfully finished operational tests of the controller using a 256×256 ROIC (CRC744). We are now upgrading the system for the ALADDIN III array. We plan to operate KASINICS by the end of 2006.