The National Ignition Facility (NIF) is under construction at LLNL for the Department of Energy Stockpile Stewardship Program. It will be used for experiments for Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF) Ignition, High Energy Density (HED) science, and basic science. Many new issues of scale, reliability and signal strength confront experimentalists who wish to install diagnostics on the NIF. To help, the ICF and HED programs at LLNL have formed a diagnostic research and development group to institute improvements outside the charter of facility diagnostics (core diagnostics). We will present data from instrumentation and associated technology that is being developed by this group. A major portion of our instrumentation work is on improvements for readout systems. We have several efforts related to CCD device development. Work has been done in collaboration with the University of Arizona to backthin a large format CCD device (36mm~2). This work has shown good results. The device has very high quantum efficiency, low noise readout and high charge transfer efficiency. The device is being fielded in direct optical, direct x-ray and 13-15 keV electron readout applications. In addition to readout device development, we have developed in collaboration with a commercial vendor a large format, compact, Ethernet addressable CCD camera system. This system fits in shoebox size volume, is thermal electrically cooled, supports a variety of CCD devices and can be run from remote locations via TCP/IP protocol. We are also improving streak camera systems. We have coupled our large format CCD system to an MK2 Kentech x-ray streak tube. Improvements have been made to the resolution and dynamic range of the system. Similar improvements have been made to the LLNL optical streak camera systems. In addition we will present data from single shot high-speed, high dynamic range data link work. We also discuss technology aimed at improvements of dynamic range for 1-6 GHz high-speed transient measurements from remote locations.
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