The PANOSETI experiment is an all-sky, all-the-time visible search for nanosecond to millisecond time-scale transients. The experiment will deploy observatory domes at several sites, each dome containing ~45 telescopes and covering ~4,440 square degrees. Here we describe the focal-plane electronics for the visible wavelength telescopes, each of which contains a Mother Board and four Quadrant Boards. On each quadrant board, 256 silicon photomultiplier (SiPM) photon detectors are arranged to measure pulse heights to search for nanosecond time-scale pulses. To simultaneously examine pulse widths over a large range of time scales (nanoseconds to milliseconds), the instrument implements both a Continuous Imaging Mode (CI-Mode) and a Pulse Height Mode (PH-Mode). Precise timing is implemented in the gateware with the White Rabbit protocol.
@article{arxiv.2111.11476,
title = {Panoramic SETI: Overall focal plane electronics and timing and network protocols},
author = {Wei Liu and Dan Werthimer and Ryan Lee and Franklin Antonio and Michael Aronson and Aaron Brown and Frank Drake and Andrew Howard and Paul Horowitz and Jerome Maire and Rick Raffanti and Remington Stone and Richard Treffers and Shelley A. Wright},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2111.11476},
year = {2021}
}