Interesting technology read that I will have to read into more when I have the time. I think the gist of the technology comes from this change to the CCD chips:
extending the output register with an additional section that is clocked with much higher voltages than usual so as to give a noiseless electron multiplication stage before the output amplifier. This signal amplification stage effectively reduces the readout noise of the on-chip amplifier by the gain factor of this multiplication register which may be set as high as many thousands. A single frame read out at high speed has essentially no readout noise with this technology.
In other words (if I have read this right), in order to detect a star with current CCD's, you need to capture about 300,000 photons, but with this new technology you can detect a star above the readout noise with as little as 100 photons.
I hope it isn't expensive to implement. This isn't something I'd expect in digital SLR's as they are CMOS sensors not CCD detectors and you read out your data in a completely different way, but I can certainly see this becoming the norm in astro CCD's if cost isn't a huge factor!
