Cooled EMCCD Camera Design

The technique of low light level night vision plays a very important role in the field of military,astronomy,and other fields.The electronic double CCD(EMCCD),because of its low noise,high quantum efficiency,long service life and so on a series of characteristics has become the focus of research.Our country's research on electronic double CCD has got some great achievement,but still has certain gap with the developed country.In terms of the development of the electronic double CCD camera,the development is also inadequate in our country.In this paper,a refrigeration EMCCD camera is designed for a specific EMCCD chip to expand the research of electronic multiplier CCD camera.In this paper,according to the characteristics and requirements of the EMCCD chip,the corresponding drive circuit,sampling circuit and imaging circuit are designed.The multiplication circuit in the drive circuit is the most difficult part of the camera.In order to reduce the dark current noise of EMCCD,appropriate cooling module is designed to keep the chip cooling to low temperature.The camera is equipped with a serial port for easy debugging and testing.A suitable power conversion module is designed for the camera to meet the working requirements of the camera.The appropriate FPGA is matched for the camera and the internal circuit of FPGA is described with Verilog HDL to meet the timing requirements of the circuit in the camera.After completing the camera construction,the function and performance of each module of the camera are tested.The output of the EMCCD chip is tested.and the result shows that the output of EMCCD performs well.The imaging effect of the camera is tested and the result shows that the camera works well at day time under normal light.The doubling and cooling effects are tested.The results show that with the increase of doubling voltage,the imaging quality of the camera is significantly improved,and with the decrease of chip operating temperature,the dark current noise is reduced.After completing the basic function test,the automatic gain function of the camera is designed and tested.The result shows that the camera can automatically adjust the gain under different illuminations to achieve the best imaging effect.