Cooling CCD camera based on embedded system

A new kind of cooling CCD camera based on an embedded system was designed according to the characteristics of the astronomical camera. Using Cortex-M3 ARM as the hardware design platform, the cooling CCD camera performed excellently in the astronomical observation. CCD vertical clock driver was designed with a CXD1267 chip, and the analog signal was correlated double sampled by an AD9826 chip. The ARM chip was used for the design of CCD driver timing. Because of the timer interrupt of the microprocessor, the temperature of the CCD chip was controlled in real-time by a Peltier cooler module. Three primary kinds of noise in the presented camera system were analyzed. The influences of the working temperature and exposure time on the noise were studied in experiments. Several measures to reduce the noise of the CCD camera were discussed.