Development of low power, microcontroller based readout systems for the Taurus experiment
Simon Tartakovsky
Princeton University

Taurus is a mid-latitude super-pressure balloon mission designed to map large angular scale polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) over about 70% of the sky. While the balloon platform enables access to high-frequency bands with minimal systematic contamination, it subjects the cryostat, housekeeping, and readout electronics to a strict mass and power budget. In this talk I will discuss how these challenges are being solved, focusing on the cryogenic housekeeping system tauHK and the time domain multiplexed (TDM) detector readout picoMUX. picoMUX is a new TDM readout electronics architecture that replaces the FPGAs typically used in such systems, with a complement of modern microcontrollers. The system achieves the required timing metrics (0.5 µs row dwell time and 50 MS/s sampling) while boasting drastic reductions in cost (?$1/column), complexity, and power (?0.1W/column) in the digital section over a comparable FPGA solution.

Date:	Mercredi, 8 avril 2026
Time:	13:00
Where:	McGill University
	Ernest Rutherford Physics, R.E. Bell Conference Room (room 103)