CCCP, a CCD Controller for Counting Photons, is presented. This new
controller uses a totally new clocking architecture and allows to drive the CCD
in a novel way. Its design is optimized for the driving of EMCCDs at up to
20MHz of pixel rate and fast vertical transfer. Using this controller, the
dominant source of noise of EMCCDs at low flux level and high frame rate, the
Clock Induced Charges, were reduced to 0.001 - 0.0018 electron/pixel/frame
(depending of the electron multiplying gain), making efficient photon counting
possible. CCCP will be deployed in 2009 on the ESO NTT through the 3D-NTT1
project and on the SOAR through the BTFI project.Comment: 10 pages, 10 figures, to appear in "Ground-based and Airborne
Instrumentation for Astronomy II" SPIE conference, Marseille, 23-28 June 200
