High speed readout electronics development for frequency-multiplexed kinetic inductance detector design optimization

Understand

Microwave Kinetic Inductance Detectors (MKID) are a promising solution for spaceborne mm-wave astronomy.

• To optimize their design and make them insensitive to the ballistic phonons created by cosmic-ray interactions in the substrate, the phonon propagation in silicon must be studied.
• A dedicated fast readout electronics, using channelized Digital Down Conversion for monitoring up to 12 MKIDs over a 100MHz bandwidth was developed.
• Thanks to the fast ADC sampling and steep digital filtering, In-phase and Quadrature samples, having a high dynamic range, are provided at ~2 Msps.