DigiCam: fully digital compact camera for SST-1M telescope

The single mirror Small Size Telescopes (SST-1M), being built by a sub-consortium of Polish and Swiss Institutions of the CTA Consortium, will be equipped with a fully digital camera with a compact photodetector plane based on silicon photomultipliers. The internal trigger signal transmission overhead will be kept at low level by introducing a high level of integration. It will be achieved by massively deploying state-of-the-art multi-gigabit transceivers, beginning from the ADC flash converters, through the internal data and trigger signals transmission over backplanes and cables, to the camera’s server 10Gb/s Ethernet links. Such approach will allow fitting the size and weight of the camera exactly to the SST-1M needs, still retaining the flexibility of a fully digital design. Such solution has low power consumption, high reliability and long lifetime. The concept of the camera will be described, along with some construction details and performance results.