A 960 × 960 fast frame store CCD detector for x-ray photon correlation spectroscopy

This paper describes a 960×960 Frame Store Fast Charge-Coupled Device (CCD) x-ray detector being used for x-ray photon correlation spectroscopy (XPCS) at the Advanced Photon Source (APS) on the 8-ID-I beam line. The detector is typically operated in either the 960 × 960 pixel mode at 100 frames per second (fps) or in the 960×90 pixel mode at 1000 fps. The vacuum subsystems consist of a top board with a custom CCD sensor, two digitizer boards with 12 custom readout chips, and a CCD clock driver board. The digitized data from the detector head is sent to a Camera Interface Node (CIN) located inside an Advanced Telecommunication Computing Architecture (ATCA) chassis. One or more processor blades in the ATCA chassis use the Message Passing Interface (MPI) protocol to perform real time parallel processing on the incoming data. When the image processing is complete, the data is stored, where it is available for further processing.