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Last modified: 2005/08/1

Examples of ESO developments that have been taken over by a manufacturer or produced commercially for a wider market

Visible CCDs	Specific ESO development contracts for CCDs include a special CCD with 16 parallel readouts intended for Shack-Hartmann sensors. This approach allowed the readout speed to be increased by a factor of 16 without any increase in the readout noise which is extremely important for this application. At ESO this chip is used in NACO. E2V has subsequently also supplied to the US firm SciMeasure for integration into wavefront sensing cameras. Another ESO development was a special CCD intended for curvature sensing applications that was designed in-house for. This allowed both intra and extra focal images to be integrated simultaneously and readout at 4000 frames per second with a readout noise of only 1.2 e^-. This CCD was fully designed at ESO and manufactured by MIT Lincoln Labs and has also been used at the CFH Telescope in Hawaii.

CCD Cryostats	Over the last 20 years, ESO has accumulated considerable practical experience in the design and use of liquid Nitrogen cryostats for CCD detectors. In the course of this time, ESO has developed a standard cryostat design which is widely used within the Organisation. Because of the wider applicability of this technology, in 1999 ESO concluded an agreement with the French firm SNLS to manufacture and sell the ESO dewar under license.

ESO Technology Division
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