A multichannel data acquisition system for bolometer detectors based on microcontroller Cortex M3 architecture

We present the first prototype of a custom Data Acquisition System for bolometer and scintillating bolometer detectors. It consists of a board controlled by a Cortex M3 microcontroller coupled with a 8 channels Sigma/Delta 24 bit ADC. The large number of bits allows having at the same time a high dynamic and a high resolution at low threshold, in order to separate very low energy events. Each board accommodates 8 input channels sampled simultaneously with a maximum rate of 50 kHz. Converted data are read by the microcontroller and sent to the remote controller using the TCP/IP or UPD communications protocol. The microcontroller also manages the board configuration. The board, exploiting the microcontroller flexibility, is fully programmable, it can work in different running modes and it can perform common data processing algorithms on the acquired data (first level trigger, digital filtering, zero suppression, FFT, etc). In this work we present tests and characterizations about this first custom data acquisition system. The results are the starting point in order to design the final prototype.