A digital CDS technique and its performance testing

Readout noise is a critical parameter for characterizing the performance of charge-coupled devices (CCDs), which can be greatly reduced by the correlated double sampling (CDS) circuit. However, a conventional CDS circuit inevitably introduces new noise since it consists of several active analog components such as operational amplifiers. This paper proposes a digital CDS circuit technique, which transforms the pre-amplified CCD signal into a train of digital presentations by a high-speed data acquisition card directly without the noisy CDS circuit, then implements the digital CDS algorithm through a numerical method. A readout noise of 3.3 e^- and an energy resolution of 121 eV@5.9 keV can be achieved via the digital CDS technique. (authors)