CCAT: Design, Implementation, and Testing of a System to Read Out over 10,000 280 GHz KIDs using RFSoC Electronics

Abstract

Over the past decade, kinetic inductance detectors (KIDs) have emerged as a viable superconducting technology for astrophysics at millimeter and submillimeter wavelengths. KIDs spanning 210 - 850 GHz across seven instrument modules will be deployed in the Prime-Cam instrument of CCAT Observatory's Fred Young Submillimeter Telescope at an elevation of 5600 m on Cerro Chajnantor in Chile's Atacama Desert. The natural frequency-division multiplexed readout of KIDs allows hundreds of detectors to be coupled to a single radio frequency (RF) transmission line, but requires sophisticated warm readout electronics. The FPGA-based Xilinx ZCU111 radio frequency system on chip (RFSoC) offers a promising and flexible solution to the challenge of warm readout. CCAT uses custom packaged RFSoCs to read out KIDs in the Prime-Cam instrument. Each RFSoC can simultaneously read out four RF channels with up to 1,000 detectors spanning a 512 MHz bandwidth per channel using the current firmware. We use five RFSoCs to read out the >10,000 KIDs in the broadband 280 GHz instrument module. Here, we describe and demonstrate the readout hardware, software and pipeline for the RFSoC system. We present a detector position map of the 280 GHz module focal plane and preliminary averaged spectral responses of a small subset of detectors from the TiN and first Al arrays. These measurements demonstrate our ability to simultaneously readout thousands of detectors, validate the end-to-end performance of the readout and optical systems, and represent a critical step toward reading out the ~100,000 KIDs in Prime-Cam in its future full capacity configuration.