  The broad energy response, low electronic read noise, and good energy
resolution have made X-ray Charge-Coupled Devices (CCDs) an obvious choice for
developing soft X-ray astronomical instruments over the last half century. They
also come in large array formats with small pixel sizes which make them a
potential candidate for the next generation astronomical X-ray missions.
However, the next generation X-ray telescopic experiments propose for
significantly larger collecting area compared to the existing observatories in
order to explore the low luminosity and high redshift X-ray universe which
requires these detectors to have an order of magnitude faster readout. In this
context, the Stanford University (SU) in collaboration with the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology (MIT) has initiated the development of fast readout
electronics for X-ray CCDs. At SU, we have designed and developed a fast and
low noise readout module with the goal of achieving a readout speed of 5
Mpixel/s. We successfully ran a prototype CCD matrix of 512 $\times$ 512 pixels
at 4 Mpixels/s. In this paper, we describe the details of the readout
electronics and report the performance of the detectors at these readout speeds
in terms of read noise and energy resolution. In the future, we plan to
continue to improve performance of the readout module and eventually converge
to a dedicated ASIC based readout system to enable parallel read out of large
array multi-node CCD devices.
