NIRCA MkII evaluation and Bread Board kit

NIRCA MkII based Front-End Electronics Breadboard

At the heart of the FEE BB are two Near-InfraRed Control and Acquisition (NIRCA MkII) Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASIC). The ASIC was developed by IDEAS is currently undergoing space qualification. The NIRCA MkII is key for minimizing the size, weight and power (SWaP) of the readout electronics in infrared payloads.

There is an optional detector emulator board that can be programmed to emaulate common MCT sensors.

The NIRCA MkII ASIC includes:

1. 16x Video ADCs sampling at up to 12 Msps.
2. 1x Housekeeping ADC for various monitoring of non-video analog signals.
3. 8x biases that can provide up to 100 mA current programmable from 0 – 3.3 V.
4. A sequencer that can be programmed using a microcontroller-like instruction set, controlling thereadout of the ADCs and control sequence using the Sensor IO interface.