Data Acquisition System for Microwave Kinetic Inductance Detectors

Energetic Cosmos Laboratory is developing Kinetic Inductance Detectors (MKID) for mm/submm astronomy purposes. In order to measure the instantaneous resonance frequency and dissipation of superconducting microresonators of the MKID arrays, we have developed a data acquisition system with emphasis on precision, readout speed and digital processing capabilities. We use IQ mixer to down convert the MKIDs signal in the range of 20-80 MHz, then digitize them by 250 MSPS ADC. Processed data at FPGA-Kintex 7 will be transferred to the PC for further analysis by the rate of 10 Gbit/sec. In this report, we describe the technical details and the algorithm we developed.