IUCAA SIDECAR Drive Electronics Controller for Teledyne HAWAII type Detector (ISDEC) is an alternative for Teledyne make JADE2 based controller.

It is a ready to use complete package and has been developed keeping in mind general astronomical requirements and widely used observatory set-ups like preferred OS-Linux, multi-extensions fits output with fully populated headers (with detector as well as telescope and observation specific information),etc. Actual Exposure times are measured for each frame to a few tens of microsecond accuracy and put in the fits header.
In this system, the computer which hosts the application programme, user interface and device drivers run on a Linux platform. It communicates through a hot-pluggable USB interface (with an optional optical fibre extender). The FPGA board in turn, controls the SIDECAR ASIC and through it a HAWAII-2RG detector, both of which are located in a cryogenic Dewar which is liquid nitrogen cooled.

Hardware - (Designed to work at - 40 deg C)

• On board 2 GB NAND memory
• Fast USB 2.0 interface (with optional external copper to fiber converters) to communicate with Host PC for configuration and science data read out
• Built around Xilinx Spartan-IIIE FPGA – supports CMOS and LVDS interface with SIDECAR ASIC
• On board NAND memory (2 GB)
• Fully compatible with Teledyne supplied HxRG firmware
• Multiple state machines to support different modes
• Serial I/F for configuration and programming SIDECAR and 16 bit parallel interface for science data read
• Line Buffer with on chip FIFO design using BLOCK RAM
• Effective use of PLL and DCM to support wide range of operation (horizontal clocks from 50 KHz to 500 KHz).

Software Features

• Linux based, Developed in C, Make, Make-install based installation
• Asynchronous USB transfer mode
• Command line options / Parameter Files
• Libraries used argtable, cfitsio, options, usb 2.0,pthreads