High speed low latency solar adaptive optics camera

This paper describes a versatile camera designed to operate at high frame rates of > 2kHz. Such high frame rates are required to reduce the latency, i.e., achieve high bandwidth in a solar adaptive optics application. The camera was designed around a 1280x1024 pixel CMOS 10-bit sensor with a readout rate of 2 microseconds per row. The output is switchable between a standard Camera Link interface with four 10-bit ports (standard camera mode) and a non-standard Camera Link interface with twelve 8-bit ports (adaptive optics mode). The programmable camera interface maps blocks of pixels to output ports enabling multiple regions of interest. This mode is of particular interest for solar multi-conjugate adaptive optics (MCAO). The speed of the camera is determined by the number of rows of pixels needed in the application. For example, a 200x200 pixel sub-array that is needed for the 97-actuator solar adaptive optics system at the Dunn Solar Telescope can be read out at a rate of 2.5kHz. Camera design and performance will be discussed.