Speaker
Description
The SLAC Microresonator RF (SMuRF) electronics is a warm readout platform deployed at scale in cosmic microwave background (CMB) experiments, where it drives ~2000-channel microwave SQUID multiplexed (µMUX) transition-edge sensor (TES) arrays and now reads out roughly 100,000 TES bolometers on the Simons Observatory. Building on this foundation, the platform is being extended to a broader range of superconducting sensors, including dense on-chip spectrometer arrays for millimeter-wave line-intensity mapping (LIM), fast pulse reconstruction in low-mass calorimeters, continuous-wave dispersive monitoring of qubit-based sensors such as superconducting quasiparticle-amplifying transmons (SQUATs) and quantum parity detectors (QPDs), and pulse-driven control of single microwave photon detectors. I will review SMuRF and show recent results from operation with other sensing modalities, including microwave kinetic inductance detectors (MKIDs) and SQUATs on radio-frequency system-on-chip (RFSoC) prototypes. I will then introduce SPECTRA (Scalable Platform for Experiment Control, Tone-tracking, and RF Acquisition), a multi-institutional effort with the Fermilab Quantum Instrumentation Control Kit (QICK) team, the University of Chicago, and partner groups across the CMB, LIM, dark matter, and rare-event communities. SPECTRA will be a fully RFSoC-based, multi-mode open-source stack running on evaluation boards, QICK hardware, and Advanced Telecommunications Computing Architecture (ATCA) carriers, targeting both the ~10,000 channels per readout line called for in LIM roadmaps and MHz-bandwidth monitoring of quantum sensors. The first planned use of SPECTRA boards in an HEP experiment is the SPT-3G+ camera at the South Pole Observatory, slated to deploy in 2028.