| Name: | Sudhanshu Nimbalkar |
| Affiliation: | Indian Institute of Technology Bombay |
| Conference ID : | ASI2022_586 |
| Title : | Electronics and hardware development for a Compton Imaging Camera for Space Astrophysics |
| Authors : | Sudhanshu Nimbalkar (IIT Bombay), Abhijeet Ghodgaonkar (IIT Bombay), Sanjoli Narang (IIT Bombay), Amit Shetye (IIT Bombay), Hrishikesh Belatikar (IIT Bombay, University of Wisconsin-Madison), Siddharth Tallur (IIT Bombay), Varun Bhalerao (IIT Bombay), Santosh Vadawale (PRL) |
| Abstract Type: | Poster |
| Abstract Category : | Instrumentation and Techniques |
| Abstract : | A Compton Imaging camera consists of a pair of detectors: one to scatter incident photons, and the other to absorb them. Using the position and energy information from both detectors, a back-projection algorithm is used to calculate the position of the source on the sky. We describe hardware setup created for demonstrating a Compton Imager in the Hard X-ray band. Our setup consists of two pixelated Cadmium Zinc Telluride (CZT) detectors working as the scatterer and absorber respectively. The detectors are mounted on individual printed circuit boards (PCB) designed in-house. The setup includes appropriate connections and grounding for using analog, digital and high voltage signals for a single device. A Xilinx Zynq-7000 series FPGA housed on a Pynq-Z2 eval board with custom IPs is used to control the detectors and read out the data. The FPGA reads data from individual detectors, and adds accurate timestamps and detector numbers needed to correctly identify Compton events. We have implemented the back-projection algorithm on the built-in ARM Cortex-A9 hard-core processor. The highly optimized C code uses just one of the two cores, and calculates a back-projected source image two orders of magnitude faster than the Python implementation on a PC. The FPGA is interfaced to a PC using a Gigabit Ethernet PHY connected directly to an ARM core. This enables commands from the PC, and the transfer of raw data and the processed back-projected image to the PC at rates of 250 Mbps. |