Control, Readout and Commissioning of the Ultra-High Speed 1 Megapixel DSSC X-Ray Camera for the European XFEL

The goal of this thesis was to develop the software and firmware basis to control and read out the 1-Megapixel DEPFET Sensor with Signal Compression (DSSC) detector, which is being built for the European XFEL (EuXFEL). The DSSC detector proposes single photon resolution at 0.5 keV photon energy, high dynamic range of 10000 photons at a very high frame rate of 4.5 MHz. During this thesis, the readout chain has been implemented, which receives the average data rate of 134 GBit/s from the detector and transfers sorted image data via four QSFP+ fiber cables to the DAQ system. Additional control software and firmware has been developed for commissioning of the first 1/16th megapixel prototypes. A multifunctional measurement and data analysis framework has been created which is used for characterization of the detector, particularly of properties of the complex readout ASICs. Additional parameter trimming routines to automatically adapt gain and offset parameters of a large pixel matrix have been developed in order to generate suitable configurations which have been applied during two measurement campaigns at the Petra III synchrotron. For integration into the new Karabo framework, which is provided by XFEL for beamline control, several software devices have been implemented