The Compact High Energy Camera is a focal plane camera designed for two mirror Schwarzschild–Couder design imaging air Cherenkov telescopes such as the SST-2M variants on the Cherenkov Telescope Array. It utilises a 2048-pixel array of silicon photomultipliers arranged in thirty-two 8 x 8 pixel2 tiles. Each detector tile is instrumented with a front-end electronics module designed to provide single photon counting with sub-nanosecond timing, full-waveform digitisation and event triggering capabilities based around TARGET ASICs. Performance results including triggering, digitiser noise, signal crosstalk, linearity and dynamic range from initial laboratory tests have been collated and are presented. •Optimised readout electronics for imaging air Cherenkov telescope cameras with SiPMs.•Triggering performance improved to <3 mV compared to previous of >20 mV.•Typical measured noise <1 mV RMS across whole 64 channel module.•Coincident crosstalk <1% between all channels across each circuit board.•Calibration technique to normalise and linearise channel signal response.