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The PAUCam is an optical camera with a wide field of view of 1 deg x 1 deg and up to 46 narrow and broad band filters. The camera is already installed on the William Herschel Telescope (WHT) in the Canary Islands, Spain and successfully commissioned during the first period of 2015. The paper presents the main results from the readout electronics commissioning tests and include an overview of the whole readout electronics system, its configuration and current performance.

The Physics of Accelerating Universe Camera (PAUCam) is a new camera for dark energy studies that will be installed in the William Herschel telescope. The main characteristic of the camera is the capacity for high precision photometric redshift measurement. The camera is composed of eighteen Hamamatsu Photonics CCDs providing a wide field of view covering a diameter of one degree. Unlike the common five optical filters of other similar surveys, PAUCam has forty optical narrow band filters which will provide higher resolution in photometric redshifts. In this paper a general description of the electronics of the camera and its status is presented.

The PAUCam is an optical camera with an array of 18 CCDs (Hamamatsu Photonics K.K.) and up to 45 narrow and broad band filters. The camera will be installed on the William Herschel Telescope (WHT) in the Canary Islands, Spain. In order to fulfill with the specifications for the camera readout system, it was necessary to test the different readout electronics subsystems individually before to integrate the final readout work package, which is composed of 4 MONSOON (NOAO) front-ends, 6 fan out boards (MIX), each one driving up to 5 CCDs signals and a pre-amplification stage (PREAMP) located inside the cryostat. To get the subsystems integration, it was built a small camera prototype using the same technology as used in the main camera: a carbon fiber cryostat refrigerated by a cryotiger cooling system but with capacity to allocate just 2 CCDs, which were readout and re-characterized to measure the electronics performance as conversion factor or gain, readout noise, stability, linearity, etc. while the cross-talk was measured by using a spot-light. The aim of this paper is to review the whole process of assembly, integration and test (AIT) of the readout electronics work package and present the main results to demonstrate the viability of the proposed systems to be use with the PAUCam camera.

PAUCam is a new camera for studying the physics of the accelerating universe. The camera will consist of eighteen 2Kx4K HPK CCDs: sixteen for science and two for guiding. The camera will be installed at the prime focus of the WHT (William Herschel Telescope). In this contribution, the architecture of the readout electronics system is presented. Back- End and Front-End electronics are described. Back-End consists of clock, bias and video processing boards, mounted on Monsoon crates. The Front-End is based on patch panel boards. These boards are plugged outside the camera feed-through panel for signal distribution. Inside the camera, individual preamplifier boards plus kapton cable completes the path to connect to each CCD. The overall signal distribution and grounding scheme is shown in this paper.

The Dark Energy Camera (DECam) was developed for use by the Dark Energy Survey (DES). The camera will be installed in the Blanco 4M telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) and be ready for observations in the second half of 2012. The focal plane consists of 62 2×4K and 12 2×2K fully depleted CCDs. The camera provides a 3 sq. degree view and the survey will cover a 5000 sq. degree area. The camera cage and corrector have already been installed. The development of the electronics to readout the focal plane was a collaborative effort by multiple institutions in the United States and in Spain. The goal of the electronics is to provide readout at 250 kpixels/second with less than 15erms noise. Integration of these efforts and initial testing took place at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. DECam currently resides at CTIO and further testing has occurred in the Coude room of the Blanco. In this paper, we describe the development of the readout system, test results and the lessons learned.

The PAUCam [1] is an optical camera with a 18 CCDs (Hamamatsu Photonics K.K.) mosaic and up to 42 narrow- and broad-band filters. It is foreseen to install it at the William Herschel Telescope (WHT) in the Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos, Canary Islands, Spain. As required by the camera construction, a couple of test bench facilities were developed, one in Madrid (CIEMAT) that is mainly devoted to CCDs read-out electronics development and filter characterization [2], and another in Barcelona (IFAE-ICE) that has as its main task to characterize the scientific CCDs in terms of Dark Current, CTE, QE, RON and many other parameters demanded by the scientific performance required. The full CCDs characterization test bench layout, its descriptions and some optical and mechanical characterization results are summarized in this paper.

The Dark Energy Survey Camera (DECam), when completed, is going to have one of the largest existing focal planes, equipped with more than 70 CCDs. Due to the large number of CCDs and the tight space on the camera, the DECam electronics group has developed new compact front-end electronics capable of flexibly and rapidly reading out all the focal plane CCDs. The system is based on the existing MONSOON Image Acquisition System designed by the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO), and it is currently being used for testing and characterization of CCDs. Boards for the new readout are being developed in USA and Spain, with the first prototypes already produced and tested. The next version with some improvements will be tested during 2008 and the system will be ready for production at the beginning of 2009. Custom MONSOON boards and the electronics path will be described.